Re: Great McPress article today on setting up Compare/Merge on PC for IBM i source members.

Good article, yet I have some caveats and thoughts.

1. Michael Sansoterra does not mention option 55 in PDM - he does compare WinMerge, the utility in question, to option 54, which is only a compare. 55 is the merge, and it has the split-SEU screen. It has many of the "advantages" Michael presents for the WinMerge app, such as seeing the differences on the same screen, being able to move between changes, all that.

He also mentions using the /QSYS.LIB/YOURLIB.LIB path for getting members into the tool. I have had problems in the past with editing source in, say TextPad, going through a mapped drive directly to a source file. Sometimes, when saving it back, it cleaned out the source member completely. This was NOT a nice thing to have happen. So I've never gone this route, say, in the last 8 years. I much prefer the safer route of WDSC/RDi/RDP.

Another possible problem with something like WinMerge will be source change dates - I know that the SoftLanding plug-in changes all those dates when you merge even one change - and I think you have to copy/paste to get the change made - I've not done it for quite a while. Some could say that this change date is less important now, maybe it isn't. I still like having it, since there isn't a diff tool or SVN-ish thing for library-based source members.

Last word or words - BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!

Vern

On 3/2/2011 8:59 AM, Bryce Martin wrote:

The article can be found here....
http://www.mcpressonline.com/programming/rpg/synchronize-your-source-files.html

I emailed the author just to let him know that it might be helpful to
mention that when you do the /QSYS.LIB/MYLIB part in setting up the new
share that you need to make sure you put the .LIB on the end of MYLIB. It
should look like this... /QSYS.LIB/BMARTIN.LIB

Other than that, it works great.


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777
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