WinMerge

WinMerge 2.10 Release Notes

• About This Release
• What Is New in 2.10.2?
• What Is New in 2.10?
• What Is New in 2.10 RC?
• What Is New in 2.9.10 Beta?
• Known Issues

September 2008

About This Release

This is a 2.10 stable release. This release replaces earlier stable releases as a recommended release.

Please submit bug reports to our bug-tracker.

What Is New in 2.10.2?

WinMerge 2.10.2 is a bug fix update for the 2.10.0 release. There are no new features or other significant changes. Most notable fixes are the fixes for the installer.

Bugs fixed

• Installer problems (not setting TortoiseSVN integration, missing icons)
• Case-sensitive regular expression search in editor did not work
• Giving path to file and folder to command line did not work (e.g WinMergeU folder/file.txt folder2 - did not open file.txt from folder2)
• If a message was shown during the file loading the location pane did not show any differences
• Fix manual URL in Readme.txt

Translations

New translation for Galician was added. Two translations were updated:

• Czech
• Ukrainian

What Is New in 2.10?

WinMerge 2.10 does not have many new features. Instead many existing features are improved and optimized. And some long-standing problems are fixed.

2.10 stable release has only couple of changes after release candidate. Those changes are couple of bug fixes and manual improvements. See the 2.10 RC and beta release changes below for more complete change list in this release.

For a complete changelog history, see the ChangeLog.txt file located in the Docs folder under the WinMerge program folder.

What Is New in 2.10 RC?

Improved user manual

The user manual has been improved a lot. The content has been practically rewritten. There are more screenshots which visualize the features. There are more index terms and internal linking.

Improved Command Line handling

Command Line handling was rewritten and several bugs were fixed in the process. WinMerge had several long-standing bugs to handle certain kinds of paths and their combinations. This new implementation fixes these problems.

Bugs fixed:

• Crash when generating a folder comparison report
• ClearCase checkout/commit dialog translation did not work

Translation updates

• Brazilian
• German
• Greek
• Japanese
• Russian
• Swedish

What Is New in 2.9.10 Beta?

Regular expressions

Regular expression library (PCRE, http://www.pcre.org/) is updated to the latest version (7.7). That will fix some problems present in older version used in WinMerge 2.8.x. PCRE is now used also in WinMerge's editor component. So Find- and Replace- features have now a lot improved regular expression support.

Installing for all users

Installer will now install WinMerge to all users. Previously the installer always installed just for the current user which causes problems in many environments. Now the Shell Integration is correctly enabled for all users after installing.

Focus losing bug has been fixed

WinMerge lost focus after doing folder compare operations (copy, delete, etc). This annoying bug has now been fixed.

Plugins disabled by default

Plugins are now disabled by default. One must enable plugins from new Plugins- dialog (Plugins/List... from the main menu). This was done because some plugins can cause unexpected behavior and compare results when they are run by default.

Unlimited undo

Undo limitation is now removed. Although the limit was high, merging large files with lots of differences could hit that limit. If all differences were copied in such files that "copy all" operation could not be undo anymore.

Changes

• Add ShellExtension menu for drive letters (root folders)
• Fix location pane flickering, optimize location pane
• Refresh compare after changing filter
• Add -u commandline parameter as alternative to -ub
• Open conflict files by drag&dropping file to main window
• Fix: the external editor command line switches didn't work
• Fix: only Courier font had boldfacing enabled in the editor
• Manual improvements

Translation updates

• New Slovenian translation
• Chinese Traditional updated

Known Issues

• 7-zip installed from MSI installer may not work with WinMerge.

  Workaround: Use the EXE installer of 7-Zip. See manual 4.5. 7-Zip and Archive Support for more information.

• Old IE version can cause crashes when handling archive files.

  Workaround: If WinMerge crashes when handling archives, consider updating IE to version 6.0 or later.

• Supercopier application causes WinMerge to hang.

  Supercopier application causes WinMerge to not exit properly and leaves WinMerge process hang. See the bug reports:

  • #1976241 the winmerge.exe process doesn't stop itself
  • #1602313 WinMerge stays in tasklist after closing

  Workaround: Disable the Supercopier when using WinMerge.

• There is no way to specify the codepage for a particular file.

  Workaround: Specify the default codepages for all files in Edit->Options->Codepage->Custom codepage.

• There is no 3-way merge. #990464

• Filters only applied when using full compare.

  Line filtering is only applied in folder compare when using Full Contents-compare method.

  If you are using any other compare method, line filters are not applied. Files marked different in folder compare can get status changed to identical when opening them to file compare.

• Some plugins shipped with WinMerge require Visual Basic runtime library to work

  Workaround: You can download the required file msvbvm60.dll or use the Run-Time Redistribution Pack from Microsoft.

  Workaround 2: If you don't need the plugin, you can safely remove it.

• VSS integration cannot add new files to VSS

  If you need to add a new file, you must add it via VSS client program.

• Unset WinMerge integration from ClearCase

  To remove WinMerge integration, you'll need to edit one file by hand:

  1. Find ClearCase installation folder
     Usually it is something like C:\Program Files\Rational\ClearCase
  2. Go to subfolder lib\mgrs\
  3. Open file map in there to editor program
  4. Comment-out the line starting with "text_file_delta xcompare", containing "WinMergeU.exe"
  5. Uncomment the line starting with "text_file_delta xcompare", containing "cleardiffmrg.exe"