Dropbox merging

[ChrisJefferson]

I'm sure this is a FAQ, but I can't find it anywhere!

I find it very annoying that when my phone and dropbox get out of sync, the only presented option I am given is "choose phone or dropbox", I would much prefer a merge take place.

The merging part is not too hard, but the way the source is currently laid out would make merging a little tricky (but not impossible). If a well-written merge was written, would it be accepted?

[ginatrapani]

If a well-written merge was written, would it be accepted?

With good unit tests, absolutely.

[fred777]

I bought todo.txt-android more than a year ago but the reason why I still do not use on a daily basis it is missing merge-ability :(

In the meantime there were many discussions on how to merge / smart-resolve conflicts, but not even a simplistic solution has been implemented.

With this comment, I'm just voting for a very simplistic merge-ability which is very easy to implement.

Instead of offering only 2 options (overwrite phone, overwrite dropbox) when out of sync, please offer a third option: merge phone and dropbox, which simply copies both files together and removes duplicate lines, i.e. lines that are absolutely equal on a character-by-character basis - no content-parsing.

This way, tasks may still get duplicated, but this won't hurt. But having only 2 choices - discard phone changes or discard dropbox changes really hurts!

Without even a simplistic merge-ability, todotxt-android is of no use for me because I do not keep my phone always-online.

[intrications]

@fred777 Why don't you implement this and send a pull request?

[fred777]

Because I haven't coded anything for Android / Java until now and it would take me a lot of time to work into it, set up Android toolchain, etc. Gina also mentioned unit-tests, which would add even more work for me.

Also, I'm not quite sure if the git repo is uptodate compared to the version offered in Google Market.

So, if I'd decide to implement an own quick&dirty solution, I'd do it with a bash shell script and Tasker.

[intrications]

Sorry, I thought because you said it would be very easy to implement that you would be able to do it. It does sound quite straightforward but, as you say, unit tests are also required.

The git repo should always be the same or ahead of the version in the Google Play Store.

[fred777]

:) If I had enough android background, I'd have done & committed it already...

PS: in Android terminal shell, cat todo1.txt todo2.txt | sort | uniq > todo.new works like a charm

[evanp]

There's a package from Google for doing diffing, matching and patching.

https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch

It's under active development, implements the best-of-breed Myers algorithm for diff/patch, and is probably a great way to start without writing diff/patch from scratch.