Trying to configure svn external diff program on mac

Question

I am having problems installing an external diff program for svn on Mac OSX Lion. I have both xxdiff and opendiff installed.

I add these lines to ~ / .subversion / config:

diff-cmd = opendiff diff3-cmd = opendiff 

or

 diff-cmd = /Applications/xxdiff.app/Contents/MacOS/xxdiff diff3-cmd = /Applications/xxdiff.app/Contents/MacOS/xxdiff 

But when I call svn, I get this error:

 svn: /Users/tre11/.subversion/config:49: Option expected 

How to fix this problem?

Answer 1

There are not many diff utilities, except of course GNU, which will accept the parameters specified by svn (bbdiff is one of the few). You must wrap the call in a shell script. He explained in the subversion docs .

Edit Based on your comment that the text diff is still running by default, I think there is an error in your .subversion / config file. This is consistent with your error message. The most likely cause is a space at the beginning of the diff-cmd . Yes, the subversion parser is fond of spaces at the beginning of a line. I put a space at the beginning of my diff-cmd and got the same "Expected Option" error.

Answer 2

Here is an example of the one I use with MacVIM

 #! /usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use constant DIFF => qw(mvim -d -f); my $parameters = $#ARGV; my $file1 = $ARGV[$parameters - 1]; my $file2 = $ARGV[$parameters]; my $title1 = $ARGV[$parameters - 4]; my $title2 = $ARGV[$parameters - 2]; $ENV{TITLE} = "$title1 - $title2"; system DIFF, '-c', 'let &titlestring=$TITLE', $file1, $file2; 

This is a Perl program (but you have Perl on your Mac, so everything is fine).

Basically, you need to know the various parameter positions passed to your program. A quick test shows the following parameters:

• -u (Unified Diff)
• -L (In diff, use the following as the header of the left file)
• bludgen.pl (revision 63) (name of the left hand)
• -L (In the diff section, use the following as the header of the right file)
• bludgen.pl (working copy) (right hand name)
• .svn/text-base/bludgen.pl.svn-base (Left file)
• bludgen.pl (right file)

More details here .