Basic questions

[kimmov]

Are you using QT libraries installed from QT SDK? And trying to compile with Visual Studio?

If so, then this is "feature" of C++ - you must compile all libraries with the same compiler, and QT libraries in QT SDK were compiled with MinGW. So you must:

• compile QScintilla and examples with MinGW or
• compile QT with Visual Studio and them compile QScintilla and examples with Visual Studio

[gerundt]

Are you using QT libraries installed from QT SDK?

At least QT is also compiled with Visual Studio. I have for example no problem to compile your "TodoList" with QT Creator and Visual Studio. And I think I compile QScintilla wit Visual Studio too. But I will check this! Thanks for the hint!

But back to the basic questions:
What is with ANSI builds? The current WinMerge versions are exists also as ANSI versions for Windows 9x. Support QT this platforms too? But personally I would drop the support for old Windows version!

[kimmov]

But back to the basic questions:
What is with ANSI builds? The current WinMerge versions are exists also as ANSI versions for Windows 9x. Support QT this platforms too? But personally I would drop the support for old Windows version!

Yep, we'll drop support for W95/98/ME. And probably also for NT4.

[gerundt]

I think we should also drop Visual SourceSafe- and Rational ClearCase support. Nobody from use it and can test it too.

[kimmov]

Agreed.

I think only way we can survive with WinMerge development is just make things simpler. And remove things nobody seems to care or able to test/debug.

[todma]

I'm sorry if I'm barging in. WinMerge is a great product and i'd like to contribute if I can.

>diff integration through (whole files loaded to) buffers. This causes lots of trouble. It limits file size, causes all kinds of complexity and bugs.
Isn't this a job for memory mapped files; mmap in posix? I don't want to rain on the parade but there are probably good native based implementations in wxWidgets. (that are cross platform and standard)

>update the GUI. Current GUI is from Win 95/98 era. Does really not fit to Vista/Windows 7 world.
Again the best you can get as far as GUI and cross platform will likely be wx.
It is unfair to compare wx to MFC because wx is really carefully designed. Just because it's macro based is a very trivial part of the comparison they are quite different (night and day how about?)
I am being unfair posting this here. There ought to be somewhere to make this discussion. Where? suggestion? But the general concepts will be relevant as far as how to do specific things (regex comes to mind, cross platform issues) which are all well ironed out in the wx world.

[kimmov]

Thanks for your input - we definitely need more people involved here!

We already decided among core developers that the best option now is to ditch the current implementation and start building next-generation WinMerge. See WinMerge3 forum for some discussion. There is no yet any code realized, just couple of testing projects where I've been experimenting with couple of components we want to use.

One of those components is libxdiff (originating from Git I think?). Which seems to offer pretty good API for differencing files and producing diffs. Downside seems to be there are no compare options like there is with diffutils. So we need to implement some kind of filtering above it. That is not biggie since we need the filtering anyway. Libxdiff also makes comparing files in parts easier since we can use API not some hacky internals.

About the GUI. We decided to go with Qt. And use Scintilla as editor since there are Qt bindings for it.

About Wx vs MFC vs Qt. Well, the point is we use framework where we get contributors and contributions. Its much less about technical qualities. And seems there is some interest in also others than me working in Qt so it is natural choice. If there would be one or more people really interested in working with Wx during last few years then we would have chosen it. Nobody was.