In 2003 WinMerge has seen a happy spurt in development activity. Several new developers have joined in actively with developer cvs access, and also some users have contributed elaborate patches, and participated in ongoing discussions.
This is exciting, and also leads to a fair amount of rapid change, so we adopted some guidelines to help safeguard our WinMerge development somewhat.
The original guidelines suggested were posted to the developer's mailing list (which is not archived). What is documented here is the actual procedures which we have been following, which are of course similar, as we developed our actual procedures based on the original suggested guidelines.
If you do not like some part of these guidelines, please feel free to post a message to the developer's mailing list or the developer's forum discussing the matter.
Post development intentions:
Before you start developing, make sure to capture a snapshot of your starting sources (presumably a pristine copy of cvs sources, or of a source zip from a distribution).
Review the sections on Coding conventions and Doxygen comments
Develop your new version.
Post your changes as a patch, to the SourceForge patch list. Try to give an informative patch title of course. Post to any relevant SourceForge bugs or RFEs, giving the patch number and title.
The active developers have often been posting entire original and modified files rather than traditional diffs, because obviously all developers have access to WinMerge to compare original and modified files, and this may be viewed as an infinite line context diff :)
Wait for reactions from other developers (and sometimes active users). If you feel impatient, you may solicit review of your patch via the developer's mailing list.
After a reasonable amount of time has passed, and no negative reviews have been posted (or after you have responded to and dealt reasonably with any that have been posted), apply the patch to CVS. (Or ask a project member to do so, if you have not yourself developer access to the project.)
What is a reasonable amount of time? That is somewhat subjective, and we need to rely on your expertise as the patch developer, but let us suggest waiting a few days for minor patches, and at least a week for major patches.
Add a note in readme.txt
telling what files you committed, and what bug/RFE/patch you solved.
This is very important so everybody else has a change to figure out who did what and when.
Perry wrote a small program called MakePatchDirs, which helps in his patch process -- read the link for more information.
It is reasonable to post small snippets of code showing small changes directly in the text in bug postings, or patch postings. For example, see PATCH [ 824987 ] "Change binary-file detection (look only for zeros)", which gives the change directly in the text.
Note, however, that sourceforge trackers currently ignore tabs, so if can convert tabs to spaces in your posting, it helps greatly.
Bugfixes may be treated less formally, especially for simple ones, or for fixes to code you know well -- eg, you caused the bug yourself with a recent patch :)
Consider still posting something to the tracker lists, even if it is simply a summary in English. If the fix is something like "misspelled variable name foo as fooz in many places", it is quite understandable that you prefer to just fix the instances rather than doing a full patch for it.
Please conform to the prevalent coding conventions. There are quite a number of files which originated elsewhere, and have their own coding conventions; please conform to the local one, in whichever files you are at work.
WinMerge itself uses Microsoft MFC style coding.
m_
.Crystal Text Editor (WinMerge/editlib/*
) and diffutils code (io.c
, normal.c
, util.c
)
use traditional Unix style coding. analyze.c
should be in this format, but we have
made a mess of it :(
We have adopted doxygen style as our desired commenting style for functions, classes, files, and so forth, in WinMerge code (this applies only to native WinMerge code, not imported files).
DiffThread.cpp
are fully doxygen commented (TODO: it would be better to give a
class example, if anyone knows a fully doxygen commented class).
docs/developers/doxygen.cfg
We have adopted the convention of using RCS id lines near the top of our source files (following the doxygen file header comments). Merely add these two lines to any new file you add to the repository, and cvs will modify the Id line by appending file version and date information at every checkin:
// RCS ID line follows -- this is updated by CVS // $Id$
We are trying to keep a consistent numbering scheme on our file releases, so everybody can figure out what we have released by just looking at the release number. However, some of our older releases do not follow this scheme.
2.1.2.0 | | | | | | | `------- This number increases for each experimental, | | | and it is reset after each beta or major release. | | `--------- Denotes a beta release, an experimental release | | or a minor bug fix of a major release. | | even numbers means "stable" (i.e. a beta). | | odd numbers means "unstable" (i.e. an experimental). | `----------- Denotes a major release. | even numbers means "stable". | odd numbers means "unstable". `------------- Denotes a major release with major changes.
In this case:
And if we decide to rewrite most of the code, the next major release will have the number 3.0.0.0
On SourceForge there is some space to put in Release Notes and Change Notes. For experimental releases make sure to put in a note stating what you would like people to test in this release, and a note telling people that this is indeed experimental, so they should not expect everything to work perfectly. For beta builds we paste in all the changes since the last beta release, so that people can see exactly what changed. For major releases, we paste in the list of changes since the last major release, and this list can become very long.
We are using InnoSetup to make an installer with WinMerge. This installer is only used for major releases, for other releases we just zip up these files:
WinMerge.exe
and WinMergeU.exe
ShellExtension.dll
and register.bat
to register itfilters/
directoryplugins/dlls/
directory. Create a MergePlugins/
directory and copy the plugins to it*.lang
files (currently we have 21 languages, counting both Chinese versions)Please remember to put the version number into both executables. You may use any of the following three methods at least.
Merge.rc
in the copy using
the MSVC6 resource editor, and compiling that (many releases have been made in this
manual, low-tech fashion).
Now that 2.4 release has translations for Shell Extension we must also carefully
version it. If we don't update version number installer won't install updated version.
There are no scripts or other tools to update version number, it must be done by hand
to ShellExtension.rc
file (make sure you update all four numbers!). Version numbers
follow the rule:
1.6.1.0 | | | | | | | `------- Not used - 0 (or your own build version?) | | `--------- Translation updates or other minor changes increase this by one | `----------- New features, bug fixes and other changes affecting to behavior | increase this number by one `------------- Denotes a major release with major changes.
Filenames in file releases follow this standard:
WinMerge-2.1.6.0-exe.zip
WinMerge-2.1.6.0-src.zip
WinMerge-2.1.6.0-Setup.exe
That is, dots are used only inside the version number and before the final extension.
When we make a release we always put a note in readme.txt
in CVS.
It is recommended to put a tag in CVS when you make a file release, because that makes it easier to pull a release version when there were code updates before and after it on the same day (because SourceForge doesn't record time of day correctly, and anyway, it it easier to just ask for a tag).
The tag should follow the same numbering scheme as used above, with the dots replaced by underscores
and prefixed with an R
, so the example experimental above would have a tag named R2_1_3_0
,
the next beta would be named R2_1_4
, and the next major release would be named R2_2
.
WinMerge.exe
and WinMergeU.exe
are always compiled with the english resources.
Custom languages are in separate dll files with extension .lang
, to be placed in WinMerge directory.
Language may be changed dynamically through the menu.
WinMerge localization is achieved through localization of resources (files with extension .rc
).
Actually there is only one rc file in the project, Merge.rc
. Localized versions for this file are
to be stored in the Languages/
directory, in the subdirectory created for that language.
Besides the resources files you could also translate things like the installer (the ISL files are just INI files) and the readme files (at the moment RTF files).
The code must use resource strings for all messages, or displayed text (column title ...).
Strings ID: when applying a patch, you may define new strings (with as ID the first free ID). But probably you wrote your patch from an old version, and someone may have already inserted a patch for this ID. You need to adapt the ID in resource.h to avoid overlapping ID.
Strings order: that is really annoying with MSVC. It is important to keep the order of strings unchanged,
because merging rc files with WinMerge is then a lot easier. Strings are grouped in block according to their ID masked by 0xFFF0
.
So there are at most 16 strings in a block, but maybe less. MSVC reorders strings between and inside blocks, but never reorder blocks
(when a new blocks is created, MSVC always put it at the last position).
Typical method to merge strings in a Merge.rc
from a patch with a Merge.rc
in CVS :
resource.h
for ID, and Merge.rc
.resource.h
.Note: Blocks are not really ordered (there order comes from history), it is not a problem as MSVC never reorders blocks after creation. If you use another tool to change resources, please make sure that the blocks order is unchanged.
Localized resources must be updated regularly with new resources from Merge.rc
.
Older localized dll may crash with a recent version of WinMerge (missing dialogs). See below...
Please try to avoid changing dialog layout when translating.
The layout should be shared by all translations as much as possible, to make merging (and future translation changes) easier.
You can of course make controls wider to fit longer texts, but you should not move buttons and other controls if not really necessary.
If you want to improve dialog layout (we welcome UI improvements) you should submit it as src/Merge.rc patch so it will be merged to all translations.
We have a customised tool for compiling language files. Project for it is in CVS:
/WinMerge/MakeResDll
When that project is compiled, it produces MakeResDll.exe
. Copy that executable
to /WinMerge/Src/Languages/
. In that directory there are already some batch-files
which can now be used to compile language files:
BuildAll.bat
/WinMerge/Src/Languages/
BuildDll.bat <lang>
CopyAll.bat
UpdateAll_resource_h.bat
resource.h
file from /WinMerge/Src/
to language directories. Handy when merging language changes.Compiled language files (*.lang
) are placed in /WinMerge/Src/Languages/Dll
.
If MakeResDll does not work, and you wish to force it to use the compiler (resource compiler and linker)
of your choice, there are registry settings to accomplish this. Perry added these because he has been
unable to get MakeResDll link successfully using VS.NET 2003, due to it failing to find mspdb71.dll
at runtime. To force use of the
Visual C++ 6 binaries, assuming Visual C++ 6 is correctly installed, set
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Thingamahoochie\MakeResDll\Settings\VcVersion="6"
It is slow and tedious to update 21 languages for just one patch. But reducing the frequency of such updates does not help either: 5 small updates are tedious and frequent, but easy; 1 big update is more infrequent, but much more tedious and difficult.
Merging of layout: translator may change layout, then when developers insert new controls, moved and new controls may overlap. Visual check of 21 dialogs is definitively too long for a single patch update.
Delays in localization: translators generally need some weeks to translate, so their version is already outdated when the localization is complete, and merging with CVS must be done again.
Translators localize just betas or releases. They don't localize CVS or experimentals (they don't have to, they may if they will, then they do the merging themselves).
Patches: developers update the files : add new items, remove deleted ones, move moved items (controls going from one dialog to another one). No care of layout or visual check of dialogs. With such updates, languages dll are valid (no crash).
We may reduce this work to the languages used by experimental testers (and, for other languages, for the next beta/release, reapply together all patches since the last beta/release localization).
Good synchronization is required between developers and translators for the latest beta/release. For older versions, translators are free. The latest beta/release is the latest build which is either a beta or either a release.
Developers do not change resources for beta/release after their creation. Only localization/layout changes may be applied.
Steps 3, 4, 5, 6 may be reproduced. As long as the impacted beta/release is the last one, step 6 is necessary (or the changes will be lost in the next beta/release). But step 6 is done by developers only once (per language and per beta/release), after it is the translator's job. Please localize once and well rather than in small chunks!
WinMerge of course, plus the plugin RCLocalizationHelper.dll
.
Most text/layout differences are ignored, so new/deleted/moved items appears clearly. Help to merge patches, and to merge a newly localized resource to its CVS version (apply the CVS changes to the newly localized resource). Contrary to a lot of (bad) localization tools, this method preserves the layout done by the translator. There are good localization tools however, and we will welcome with pleasure anyone with such a tool in the project.
Logs are a good tool for tracing errors. But logs must be first written. Its always a good habit to write error message to logfile also.
Simplest way to write errormessage to log is using
void LogErrorString(LPCTSTR sz)
defined in stdafx.h
. Another
way is to directly use gLog
which is global instance of
CLogFile
. Log is written to users temporary directory ($temp
) with name
WinMerge.log
.
Log writing is controlled by registry value:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Thingamahoochie\WinMerge\Settings\Logging
Possible values are:
WinMerge sets executable path (WinMerge.exe
) which shellextension starts every
time when options-dialog is closed. This can cause problems when testing
several versions of WinMerge. There is registry value to overwrite path to
WinMerge executable:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Thingamahoochie\WinMerge\PriExecutable
It does not exist by default, so create PriExecutable
as string value and type
path of WinMerge.exe
you mainly use as its value. If this value exists
ShellExtension does not care about another path value.