FileMerge and CVS
I’ve been working on improving my workflow in programming lately. This is mainly due to the fact that I now work from home. Working from home poses some new problems since I don’t have a 1Gb connection to my network resources anymore. In the process of rethinking my processes, I decided to play around with FileMerge, one of Apple’s developer tools. FileMerge enables you to visually see the difference between two files and interactively merge them into one final form. This is a very common operation when using CVS and you have a conflict with a push from another developer, or you just want to see the differences between two file revisions. Because I use it in conjunction with CVS so much, I thought I’d add some CVS features to FileMerge.
The result of this work is cvs-opendiff. It’s called cvs-opendiff because Apple supplies a utility called opendiff which invokes FileMerge from the command-line, and cvs-opendiff invokes this command along with various CVS commands to do its work. The feature list for cvs-opendiff is shown below.
- Compares two files like diff
- Compares the current working file with the current revision in CVS
- Compares two file revisions or dates
- Continues running until FileMerge is exited, or the window containing the file comparison is closed
This last feature is the key feature since the opendiff command exits as soon as it finished invoking FileMerge. This behavior is often undesirable when merging files especially when the merge is invoked by a third tool that expects this behavior.
I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions for cvs-opendiff. I’m planning on starting to work with subversion soon, so I imagine I’ll be updating it to work with that eventually.
