Subject: Success with a concurrent change!

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 94 12:44:56 EDT

Dear AstroWeb friends,

Today I fetched a copy of the database, and made many changes.  The
STScI server refused to do the update, apparently because it knew that
I had fetched my copy _before_ Anton had done an update. It said "Try
Starting From Scratch Again". This message was rather irritating, but
at least the server was protecting against loss of Anton's changes.

I fetched a new copy of the database, now including Anton's changes.
How to merge his changes with mine?!? 

I decided to try Sun's 'filemerge' tool (in directory /usr/lang/).
The tool ran for many minutes, and finally crashed when it filled the
disk.  The temp directory contained two files of 20_MB and one of
178_MB!!  Then I had an idea: perhaps filemerge was having trouble
with the very long lines in newmaster.html? I generated a keyboard
macro in Emacs to insert newlines, executed it on the two files, and
tried filemerge again. Success!!

The filemerge tool displayed three windows: my version, Anton's
version, and the merged output file. There were 'left' and 'right'
buttons. The tool goes through the file asking for a decision (left or
right version, or hand-edit) on each difference. In only a few minutes
I created a merged database, which I then was able to upload to STScI.

I recommend that http://lor.stsci.edu/astroweb/newmaster.html be
changed to have short lines.

-Don