[PD-dev] Treating .pd-files as binaryin CVS

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> I wonder how I could test that reliably. I already tried to make some
> simple changes to Pd files like deleting objects. commiting the
> changes to a svn-repository, replacing the changed file with the
> previous version and and running update afterwards did work, so it
> seems. (Is this merging?) At least the patch was functional and was
> missing the previously deleted objects.

In a Pd patch, every object is numbered 0, 1, 2, ... depending on its
order in the patch. Then the "#X connect" lines depend on this numbering
to specify where the wires should be. If you let CVS handle this, then
chances are the wires will be set all wrong, unless you only deleted the
last objects in the list. A merge-tool for Pd would have to rewrite all of
the "#X connect" lines when merging patches, but there are other reasons
why the merging of Pd patches is complicated... I've only thought about
making a special diff-tool for Pd patches and already there are things I
simply can't figure out how to make work in appropriate ways, which is why
I never got to the point of writing such a program.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju