In-place editing of the files (merge feature)

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 04.06.08 23:57:19, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 June 2008, Pavol Rusnak wrote:
> > I would like to ask if there are any plans to add in-place editing of
> > the compared files. Meld[1] allows this and it is a very great feature
> > in my opinion, because it makes merging two files much much more effective.
> 
> Sorry, but there are currently no such plans. You can file this as an RFE 
> ("wishlist" type bug) in bugs.kde.org so it won't be lost, but please don't 
> expect it to be handled soon, unless you propose a patch implementing it. ;-) 
> There are already way too many RFEs (and other assorted bugs, mostly minor 
> glitches nobody cared about enough to fix them) for Kompare.
> 
> The technical reason this isn't currently implemented is that the diff viewer 
> is designed only for viewing, it is not a text editor component, just a plain 
> K3ListView. It would probably be fairly easy to enable the "renaming" 
> functionality in K3ListView, allowing to edit the files line by line (but 
> actually writing the changes to the files properly is probably less trivial), 
> but I don't think this is really what the user expects, the days of line 
> editors are long past. ;-)

I have no idea about how diffing algorithms in general work, but isn't
it maybe easier (and sufficient) to just be able to move one hunk from
one file to another? At least thats what eclipse allows to do when
merging conflicts in svn-controlled files and it works in many cases. Of
course not with all, when you want to actually mix two hunks - i.e. copy
the first two files of the left-hunk, then 3 files from the right and
then the rest from the left...

And as far as writing files back: Thats not needed, you should just
write a new file with the original content of file A + the hunks that
where chosen from file B.

Andreas

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