A new release of wiggle

24 March 2010, 06:46 UTC

A long time ago, while in a job far far away....

Back in 2003 I wrote a program called "wiggle". Like many interesting projects it was written to scratch an itch.

While developing code for the Linux kernel I would often need to apply patches made for earlier versions against later versions. Sometimes there would be trivial conflicts and the "patch" program would just give up an create a reject file. After the 50th time that I applied a patch like this by hand it decided that enough was enough so I wrote "wiggle". It takes patches that don't quite apply properly and wiggles them in to place. If there is a change in part of the code that the patch doesn't actually change, wiggle doesn't let that get in the way. If there is a change in part of the code that the patch also changes, wiggle reports that inline as a conflict in a way that makes it easy to resolve by hand.

Since 2003 I have made a few improvements and fixed a few bugs. Just recently the Debian package of wiggle got a new maintainer who was very proactive in trying to get some patches upstream to me, and get some languishing bugs fixed.

Always keen to reward such friendly behaviour I applied the patches, fixed the bugs and finally made a new release of wiggle, the first in nearly 7 years.

Version 0.7 can be found in my git tree at git://neil.brown.name/wiggle or browsers at http://neil.brown.name/git?p=wiggle;a=summary or downloaded as a 'tar' archive from http://neil.brown.name/wiggle.

Feedback always welcome.

What I really want to know is how to get git to always use wiggle for merging conflicts. I can do it on a per-repository basis by setting the 'merge' attribute (I think) but I cannot make it automatically apply to all of my git trees...

Go there...
http://neil.brown.name/blog/20100324064620

I found this App in the Fedora 13 Repos and looked it up. Looks interesting, especially if he gets it to work automatically with all Repos...

Don