How to merge a complicated mess

[Dave S]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> wrote:

> Harvey Chapman <hchapman-hg at 3gfp.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> Harry wrote:
>
> >> All I can think of is having to do it all by hand which sounds like
> >> a lot of time and effort.  And maybe not worth it
>
> Harvey responded:
>
> > Try pulling them into one repo and find yourself a nice graphical
> > merge tool for your OS.
>
> I'm not sure I understand why a graphical merge tool would be good.
> I've used emacs ediff, vimdiff amd linux/unix diff.  But like I
> mentioned.. I've not done serious merging with any of them.
>
>
For your purposes, you probably just need to find what's missing in one
file that's in the alternative version, and be able to copy it from one to
the other.  If you've got formatting differences, that may be a little
trickier for the tools to deal with in a way that's any better than putting
the printouts up on the wall and going through them with a marker pen, but
sometimes you can use another tool to filter the differences out.

I'm fond of Beyond Compare, myself.  Not free, but you can try it for a
month for free, and they have a Linux version that's pretty solid.  Very
nice GUI diff program.  It will clearly identify blocks that are in
different places in the files although it may not know that those are the
same piece.  You can select to show all, show differences only, or show
orphans only.  This works in text compares and in directory compares.   For
your purposes, the 2-way compare is probably enough, but they do support
(in the Pro edition) 3-way merges.  Beyond Compare has ways to run filter
programs and is also scriptable, which isn't needed for this job.
<URL:http://www.scootersoftware.com/>

I've also used kdiff3, which is free, and works well, but I have to
re-learn it each time.

Dave
/dps

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