xxdiff with mercurial

Martin Blais blais at furius.ca
Wed Feb 13 19:11:58 CST 2008


Vadim Lebedev vadim at mbdsys.com wrote:
> What would be the advantages of xxdiff over kdiff3?

I haven't checked kdiff3 in years, so I wouldn't know. Back
in the days it was just starting out. I'm sure it must have
improved since. Note that xxdiff has originally evolved in a
context of 300 engineers using it multiple times per day to
do merge reviews, so it might have slightly different
features than the other open source variants.

These files might be informative:
http://furius.ca/xxdiff/doc/xxdiff-secrets.html

See the full documentation here for unique features:
http://furius.ca/xxdiff/doc/xxdiff-doc.html


Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com wrote:
> > In addition, it invokes xxdiff
> > in decision mode, and this case is exactly what decision
> > mode was built to handle (you press "A" to accept the
> > changes, "R" to reject them, and "M" to accept the
> > selections).  Note that you will need to install xxdiff
> > Python libs in order to use it (xxdiff comes with support to
> > invoke it in various ways.)
> 
> What's this about the xxdiff Python libs? Is decision mode not a
> command-line switch?

Yes, it is only a special mode that is invoked from a
cmd-line switch, which forces the user to making a decision
about all diff hunks, and then outputs a string concerning
the decision made by the user. See this file for details:

http://furius.ca/xxdiff/doc/xxdiff-integration.html

(I'd rather use your approach though. I think on the next
release that includes the changes you mention I'll probably
delete xx-hg-merge and add a note in the docs.)

The Python code contains common facilities for invoking it
in various ways and parsing the results. It's pretty
lightweight, you don't really need to use it if you don't
want to, but all the support scripts I wrote around xxdiff
take advantage of it.

cheers,





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