Advogato.org: Merge tools

“Ever tried to keep up, on an hourly basis, with two other
developers? Each of you is working in your own branch. One is doing
far-out research. One is doing the next stable release. One is
doing the current stable release. Never seriously used X-windows or
emacs? Where do you compromise your development-style
principles? When you’re faced with 300,000 lines of code, and daily
merges [that took one developer only one hours’ work] are cut from
six hours to 30 minutes. Enter dirdiff.“

“So you use vi, linux-console-mode with six 80×60 screens, diff,
patch, ctags and grep. Get a life and use emacs? No thanks. tried
it. Was told that it didn’t have different modes for text-editing
and text-entry, it was better all-round. Had this wonderful thing
called emerge, it could solve all my problems of how to do, as
Jeremy Allison described it from over a year ago, ‘The MFH ™’ –
The Merge From Hell.”

“One Samba team member had already tried, and failed. To give
you an idea of the size of the task, the diff file between the
stable Samba 2.0 tree and what is now the Samba TNG tree (The Next
Generation), was 7 megabytes, and that was six months ago.”

Complete
Story