What does the equal sign mean in TortoiseMerge?

Question

In the TortoiseMerge document, an equal sign means:

The change is canceled by returning to the original contents of the line.

The panel shows the differences between mines or theirs and the base, my questions are:

If something is deleted, you can use the minus sign. If something is added, add a character. Why do I need an equal sign? What does the description of the "original content of the string" mean?

Answer 1

Mike's answer is correct. To develop a little, this is an artifact of how subversion brings change together. He applies all the changes that occurred between the source of the merger and the destination, regardless of what changes you told him to merge, and then “cancels” any changes that you did not specify.

Here is an example: I enter a file from my trunk in rev 1. I change line 100 in my version of trunk and commit it as rev 2. Then I change line 200 and commit it as rev 3. If I then go on to merge only rev 3 into my branch, I will see that one of these equivalent characters on line 100 is because subversion merged rev 2, merged rev 3, and then un-merged rev 2. Since the user specified only to merge the changes in rev 3, the change in rev 2 not included in the merger.

Answer 2

As for turtle docs, this means: "The change was canceled by returning to the original contents of the row."

Line Status Icons Chapter 3. Using TortoiseMerge

http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/TortoiseMerge_en/tmerge-dug-icons.html

Answer 3

Based on the documentation link given by Randy D. Binondo and previous experience with VCS, this means that the row change was done with a complete merge, but was automatically canceled for (for example, when combining a limited set of revisions from a branch, and not all revisions )

This makes sense, since preliminary changes may be required for Subversion to build the correct diff for merging. I strongly suspect that Subversion compiles all the diffs for each corresponding branch, starting with a common ancestor of revisions, and then tries to return unwanted differences, which leads to the behavior indicated by the equal symbol. I haven't read the Version Control with Subversion book yet, but that might also help with that.

The symbol, of course, does not mean that both files made the same changes independently, as suggested by Phonon. A quick test confirms this.

Answer 4

I am sure this means that both files made the same changes independently.