[pmwiki-users] Merging - Nothing to do for Windows Users ?

[Joachim Durchholz]

Philippe Krait wrote:
> Beside myself, there has been another comment from a windows user for
> whom the merging (using diff3) does not work.
> 
> Is there really nothing to do about this very very annoying problem ?
> I don't think I can solve it myself, and I can only offer to test it
> on my wiki, but I really wish that something could be done.

diff3 is an option (or variant) of the diff program, and comes in
various flavors. You can get it for Windows either by installing Cygwin
(which emulates enough of a typical Unix environment that the GNU
utilities will run on them), or by installing the unxutilities from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/; to install just diff, you can also get
http://www.vikinc.net/share/gnudiffwin32.zip which is contains just the
diff program.
Personally, I found the unxutilities diff less of a hassle to install
than the Cygwin one, and have better performance, but that's just
anecdotal evidence.

A pure PHP solution would be better. The downside is that writing one
would be a serious task. The upside is that this already has been done,
see http://pear.php.net/package/Text_Diff .

BTW another downside of the PHP solution is that it requires at least
PHP 4.2.0. This excludes all who're using Debian woody, which comes with 
PHP 4.1.2 (after updates, I think initially you even get 4.0.something).

Regards,
Jo