Advanced Tutorial 2: fully integrate Ellié Computing Merge with my VCS and work with an opensource project

 

 

What you will learn with this tutorial

Prerequisites

Step 1: Set up the integration as differentiation tool in your VCS

Most VCS / SCM tools widely available today have parameters to let you replace the built-in differentiation tool. Why do they? because a differentiation (or comparison) and merge tool is really a big piece of software and needs important efforts to develop efficient, complete and practical features.

Have a look to this page Integration with Configuration Management Systems, if you do not find your tool there, here are some steps to help configure your VCS:

Now that you integrated Ellié Computing Merge as the differ of your VCS tool, you will be able to profit of quality comparison and merges whenever your working interface is that tool, but that's always the case.

Step 2: Set up a comparison view with a VCS repository

As Ellié Computing Merge contains a good script-enabled editor, you may want to edit, patch or merge your files directly from Ellié Computing Merge.
If you use a version control system to historize and protect your developments, you probably want to compare your local version to the last check-in version or have the check-out commands run automatically, prompting for comments as necessary.

In order to do that you have first to verify the setup of your tool:

Our workspace is rather well setup, let's open a folder comparison, pressing Ctrl+M (Ctrl+Shift+M on Mac) or :

Step 3: Set up a mapping to get check-out feature

Previous steps got you with a running comparison, but when editing Ellié Computing Merge is not yet aware of SCC control on that files. You can configure Ellié Computing Merge this way:

Step 4: Importing a patch

In the previously open folder comparison view, we are going to import a patch. Patching is technic which use a change descriptin file (a 'patch' or a 'diff') , an interpreter parses this file and updates a source file accordingly to build a target version. Ellié Computing Merge can do this in-place (overwriting the source when everything is OK) or out of place. Independently from the location of the produced target, Ellié Computing Merge let you preview the result of the application of the patch. Let's try this:

Here is a very simple patch, updating a file called "new text file.txt" which should be empty, and patch it with the standard Hello world message:

--- C:\temp\plouf2\New text file.txt 2007-10-16 16:29:17.000 +0200
+++ C:\temp\plouf5\New text file.txt 2007-10-16 16:29:41.000 +0200
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+Hello world 

Now that you applied succesfully your first patch, you will be able to take patches from Internet and apply them selectively, for example, to get only parts of a published version in a public project (this is often useful to get the bug fixes released in a new version of the project, without all the other changes for which it is often difficult to be sure that they won't make regress your own project). 

Step 5: Generating a patch

We applied a simple patch with Ellié Computing Merge, it is now time to generate a simple patch.

You are now OK to work with most open source projects for which patch application is still the way to go when exchanging, integrating changes.

We hope that you found this tutorial useful and that you learnt several features. If you think that we could improve this tutorial, please contact us at info@elliecomputing.com or create a ticket on our website