How Do You Diff?
The other day I was working on a page that made heavy use of JavaScript. I’d been cool about it actually; I was using Prototype and Scriptaculous as the framework. I was even testing with virtual machines and everything!
DiffMerge
Then, mysteriously, the page stopped working in IE. Really frustrating because, well, fuck man, it WORKED. Why it happened doesn’t matter; I did something pretty stupid.
What is important is that it was fixed. For that, I went through my source (SVN) repository and found the file that worked. Easy really.
This still left the issue of why it happened though.
Quick aside: I don’t understand people who just accept that something works (ie; it broke, I fixed it, I’m done). How can you not need to figure out what happened? How will you prevent this from happening again?
To solve that little mystery I busted out my trusy diff tool; SourceGear’s DiffMerge.
I’ve tried a bunch of diff tools, on both Windows and Linux, but at this point I’m really digging DiffMerge. According to the site:
- Diff. Graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
- Merge. Graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
- Folder Diff. Performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
- Configurable. Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
It’s a really great diff tool totally worth checking out.
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