On Mar 25, 2010, at 12:23 PM, [email protected] wrote:

> On Mar 25, 2010, at 11:12 AM, Sean McBride wrote:
> 
>> That's all fine and good until you need to change a xib (or worse,
>> nib).  xibs are neither diffable nor auto-mergeable.  In my experience,
>> they are the single biggest PITA when trying to work with branches.  I
>> actually find myself missing Rez<->DeRez.
> 
> I thought xib files were diffable - aren't they just XML files - while nib 
> files were binary files and not diffable or mergeable.

The problem isn't so much the file format, it's Interface Builder.  IB is too 
prone to renumbering/reordering objects or implementing a simple property 
change as removal of the object and replacement with a new object.


> I admit I get a little worried when trying to merge multiple changes on some 
> XML files such as the project.pbxproj if multiple different files have been 
> added to the project on different computers. 
> 
> Can anyone speak authoritatively on this? Can you reliably merge the various 
> XML files that Xcode/IB uses using the tools in version control systems (I'm 
> using Mercurial now)?

You can reliably merge .pbxproj files.  Of course, there can be conflicts, but 
those are very often just a matter of new lines being added in the same 
vicinity on the two branches, so the resolution is to keep both sets.  The 
.pbxproj contents can be understood fairly well, especially thanks to the 
comments within them, so you should be able to make sense of more complicated 
conflicts with a bit of thought.

XIBs can't be reliably merged by naive algorithms, I don't think.

YMMV.

Regards,
Ken

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