Re: [PATCH] mergetool--lib: add p4merge as a pre-configured mergetool option

[Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/30 Markus Heidelberg <markus.heidelberg@web.de>:
>> Another possible problem: the user can change the installation
>> destination on Windows. What's the behaviour of Mac OS here? Is the
>> instalation path fixed or changeable?

This has already been answered. Yes the application can move on OS X,
but 9/10 it will be in one of two standard locations. There are ways
to find an application regardless of where it is, but it's maybe not
worth the platform specific complexity for that 1/10 time.

> For Windows, the program should have an InstallDir or similar registry
> value in a fixed place in the registry to point to where it is
> installed (something like
> HKLM/Software/[Vendor]/[Application]/[Version]).

And if someone wants to contribute the code to grub around the
registry on Windows, I'm all for it, as long as it doesn't negatively
impact non-Windows users (and similarly for any other platform
specific code -- don't impact users of other platforms negatively).

> As for Linux, there is no guarantee that things like p4merge are in
> the path either. It could be placed under /opt/perforce or
> /home/perforce.

No, of course not, but again, looking in PATH is likely to work in the
common case. By looking in /Application and $HOME/Applications, that
covers the common case on OS X.

> What would be sensible (for all platforms) is:
>  1/  if [difftool|mergetool].toolname.path is set, use that (is this
> documented?)
>  2/  try looking for the tool in the system path
>  3/  try some intelligent guessing
>  4/  if none of these work, print out an error message -- ideally,
> this should mention the configuration option in (1)

This is basically what is already done, but (3) isn't yet platform
specific in any way, and (4) doesn't mention the config option.

> (3) is what is being discussed. It is good that it will work without
> any user configuration (especially for standard tools installed in
> standard places), but isn't really a big problem as long as the user
> is prompted to configure the tool path. Also, I'm not sure how this
> will work with multiple versions of the tools installed (e.g. vim/gvim
> and p4merge).

There's a fixed order of tools, first tool that's found wins.

Oh, and my favorite color paint is blue. :-)

j.