-----Original Message-----
From: Wesley North [mailto:WNorth@acssys.com
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 11:52 AM
To: Aurenz, Scot; 'GEwens@gaudia.com'; 'andrew.markebo@telelogic.com'; CCIUG
Cc: Parmenter, Tom; Harrison, Nancy; Dudek, Jo
Subject: RE: RE: [cciug] XML as normal text
I have tried to use the text merge option when merging XML and it ends up
giving some error regarding user rights. If I change the map setting to
merge as cleardiffmrg.exe everything works fine and the error is not
present.
Sorry about this.There was a launch problem in 4.0 that could occur because
the
resulting command line got too long. Was the pathname of your contributors
fairly long?
Are you using Win95? In any case, this problem is fixed in 4.1 (I use a
different technique
to launch the text tool).
Rather than have to constantly select the text merge option on each file
that comes up with a conflict, I have found it to be more efficient just to
change the map setting.
Give me a reason why I shouldn't do this. From what I can tell the text
merge utility is much more robust and flexible when it comes to merging code
of any kind.
At this point in time, the text utility is certainly more mature and robust,
and the GUI
is currently much easier to understand. However, the XML tool offers several
advantages
which you may (or may not) care about. Among them:
* It eliminates "spurious" diffs caused by non-terminal whitespace. A chunk
of data may
be formatted in XML in many different ways. Small diffs may cause many
lines of XML
to be different. A line-oriented tool may be totally defeated by such
diffs. It may be very
difficult for a user to find the "real" diffs within. The XML tool only
shows real diffs
because it parses XML. The tree display further shows proper structure in
an XML
document that may not be "pretty-printed" for human readability.
When MSXML saves an XML document, for example, no whitespace is added.
A 100K file may be only one "line" long! Plus, in cases like this, the
text diff merge
tool will fail because it has an upper limit (max line length). XML diff
merge does
not have this limitation. It will happily take that single 100K line, show
you the tree,
and flag the nodes with diffs.
* It shields the user from the need to know a lot of XML syntax. It is
therefore similar
to "regedit" - a tool that lets you navigate a tree of data and make
changes without
the need to know a lot of syntax. And all diffs are presented in
"syntactically meaningful"
ways (e.g., an attribute value was changed in this element).
If your XML is generated by humans, perhaps these are of little concern to
you.
The "Compare/Merge as Text" feature is good if the tool gets in the way only
occasionally.
If the XML tool is never OK for you to use (as appears to be the case), then
by all
means change the map file.
Again, I apologise if the tool is not currently what you need. But please
reconsider it
in future releases.
________________________________________________________
Scot Aurenz
R a t i o n a l
the e-development company
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