No text search option in diff merge tool?

roman · Post by **roman** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 2:17 pm

I can not believe that sourcegear still did not add a text search option (menu and F1) to Vault diff merge tool. How easy it should be to add this feature, and it is missing for more then a year now.

I assume this is in the list of things to do, but the developer does not bother to do it because it is too easy?

I apologize for being annoyed, but it is hard not to complain about this one.

Jaeyoun Yi · Post by **Jaeyoun Yi** » Wed Jan 26, 2005 7:48 pm

I'm another vault user and absolutely agree that the source-gear diff-merge tool is very poor! ^^;

So, I've encouraged other developers in my company to use 3rd party diff-merge tool.
I recommend you to try to use 'Beyond Compare' from http://www.scootersoftware.com/
It is very powerful and works well with the vault, too.

To use it with vault, in Diff/merge cateogry of the Vault Options,
set the arguments of diff and merge like;

diff arguments:
/title1="%LEFT_LABEL%" /title2="%RIGHT_LABEL%" "%LEFT_PATH%" "%RIGHT_PATH%" /noedit

merge arguments:
/title1="%WORKING_LABEL%" /title2="%OTHER_LABEL%" "%WORKING_PATH%" "%OTHER_PATH%" /rightreadonly /mergeoutput="%DEST_PATH%"

And I hope that the future sourcegear's diff-merge tool will be like that.

Regards,
Jaeyoun Yi.

roman · Post by **roman** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 12:12 pm

Jaeyoun Yi,

Thank you for the recommendation, i will try it immediately. Beyond Compare seems to have a free trial.

It is still disappointing that SourceGear did not implement a couple of easy features that would make the tool much more usable.

roman · Post by **roman** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 2:03 pm

Yes, it seems to work great !

GregM · Post by **GregM** » Fri Jan 28, 2005 7:51 am

Jaeyoun, we've been using BC here for a long time. Everything I can find in the Beyond Compare help and on their web site says that they don't do three way merges. I can't find any documentation on the /mergeoutput switch, and I don't see any difference between the UI when the switch is added. Where did you find the information that it does a three-way merge and that it works with this switch?

Jaeyoun Yi · Post by **Jaeyoun Yi** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:48 pm

Beyond Compare doesn't provide 3-way merge.
But by using the arguments that I mentioned in the above,
we can merge two source files very effectively.

In the BC, you can view the two source panes side-by-side.
Using the arguments, you can view the local version in the left side, and the repository version in the right side.
And what you have to do is to have the left side (local version) source contain properly merged contents!
Then, you can save the local version and check-in it.

To be frankly, I'm not sure if the /mergeoutput switch is depricated or not.
But it's been working well. (I'm using BC 2.5 and 2.7)

Regards,
Jaeyoun Yi

GregM · Post by **GregM** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 10:03 pm

Okay, I thought you were talking about doing an automatic merge. I do basically the same thing currently through the "diff" command, when the automatic merge isn't sufficient.

christian · Post by **christian** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 6:23 am

Haven't used it myself but you may want to check out
SureMerge from Guiffy (as recommended by Eric Sink in his weblog, I believe).

I would also recommend reading the following article about the problems you're likely going to encounter when doing a three-way merge:

http://www.guiffy.com/SureMergeWP.html

Christian