RE: [patch]:change, which allows to work with selections.

[Oleg LARIN <oleg larin st com>]

Hi, Kai.

Some of my co-workers are using meld (as well as myself),
all of us would like this feature and we had seen this
implemented in other "merge" tools. This includes "Replace"
functionality -  when user wants to copy over just some part of a chunk,
lets say few lines instead of full chunk. This happens very often
when somebody ports back newer software version to many versions
backward - some of changes sitting together can not be applied to the older
version as one chunk.

That was why I have implemented this feature having also an idea not to change
a lot. If you look at what this change does, it is exactly what you are saying -
"I think we'd want to create a fake diff chunk from the current selection, and then
call the existing chunk action methods with that".

Thanks.
Oleg.


________________________________________
From: Kai [kai willadsen gmail com]
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2011 11:52 PM
To: Oleg LARIN
Cc: meld-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [patch]:change, which allows to work with selections.

On 28 April 2011 11:31, Oleg LARIN <oleg larin st com> wrote:
>
> _______________________________________________
> meld-list mailing list
> meld-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/meld-list

If I understand correctly, these changes are supposed to allow
treating selected text as a diff chunk for the sake of certain
actions.

The "Copy above/below" changes seem the most useful. However, if/when
there is an action for changing between panes (working on it), I'm not
sure I see significant benefit to this support over a simple
copy/switch/paste. How do you see this being used?

The "Replace" changes seem dubious to me, as I don't think that the
provided behaviour is at all what a user would expect. Finally,
there's no reason to support the "Delete" action, since the user can
accomplish exactly the same thing by hitting Backspace or Delete.

In any case, the patch incorrectly changes the semantics of the
*_chunk methods, which specifically deal with doing something to a
chunk. If any of these changes were to go in to Meld, I think we'd
want to create a fake diff chunk from the current selection, and then
call the existing chunk action methods with that. However, I'm not
convinced that it's a good idea.

cheers,
Kai