"Could not start external merge program"

[Ghost]

I'm getting this error whenever I try to use TortoiseSVN's "edit
conflicts" tool:

Could not start external merge program!
--------
The directory name is invalid.

Similarly, I get the same error only with "diff" instead of "merge"
when trying to compare revisions. For that, I even tried installing
WinMerge and set up TortoiseSVN to use that external program, and I
get the same error.

I am running Windows Vista 64-bit edition and here is my version
information:

TortoiseSVN 1.5.4, Build 14259 - 64 Bit , 2008/10/11 08:23:13
Subversion 1.5.3,
apr 1.2.12
apr-utils 1.2.12
berkeley db 4.4.20
neon 0.28.3
OpenSSL 0.9.8i 15 Sep 2008
zlib 1.2.3

Anyone have any ideas on how I might resolve this?

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[Stefan Küng]

Ghost wrote:
> I'm getting this error whenever I try to use TortoiseSVN's "edit
> conflicts" tool:
>
> Could not start external merge program!
> --------
> The directory name is invalid.
>
>
> Similarly, I get the same error only with "diff" instead of "merge"
> when trying to compare revisions. For that, I even tried installing
> WinMerge and set up TortoiseSVN to use that external program, and I
> get the same error.

This should not happen if you've set up the external diff/merge tools
correctly. Does this also happen if you set the options to use
TortoiseMerge instead of a custom diff/merge tool?

Stefan

--
___
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\ \_/_\_/> The coolest Interface to (Sub)Version Control
/_/ \_\ http://tortoisesvn.net

[Ghost]

On Oct 25, 8:16 am, Stefan Küng <tortoise...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ghost wrote:
> > I'm getting this error whenever I try to use TortoiseSVN's "edit
> > conflicts" tool:
>
> > Could not start external merge program!
> > --------
> > The directory name is invalid.
>
> > Similarly, I get the same error only with "diff" instead of "merge"
> > when trying to compare revisions.  For that, I even tried installing
> > WinMerge and set up TortoiseSVN to use that external program, and I
> > get the same error.
>
> This should not happen if you've set up the external diff/merge tools
> correctly. Does this also happen if you set the options to use
> TortoiseMerge instead of a custom diff/merge tool?

Yes, originally I had just installed TortoiseSVN and no external diff/
merge tools. In the past (on Windows XP) that worked fine for me.
But now on Vista, TortoiseSVN doesn't seem able to call TortoiseMerge,
or the external program either -- I've triple-checked the path to the
WinMerge executable and it's valid. I used the Browse... button to
get to it in the TortoiseSVN options dialog.

[Stefan Küng]

Ghost wrote:
> On Oct 25, 8:16 am, Stefan Küng <tortoise...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ghost wrote:
>>> I'm getting this error whenever I try to use TortoiseSVN's "edit
>>> conflicts" tool:
>>> Could not start external merge program!
>>> --------
>>> The directory name is invalid.
>>> Similarly, I get the same error only with "diff" instead of "merge"
>>> when trying to compare revisions. For that, I even tried installing
>>> WinMerge and set up TortoiseSVN to use that external program, and I
>>> get the same error.
>> This should not happen if you've set up the external diff/merge tools
>> correctly. Does this also happen if you set the options to use
>> TortoiseMerge instead of a custom diff/merge tool?
>
> Yes, originally I had just installed TortoiseSVN and no external diff/
> merge tools. In the past (on Windows XP) that worked fine for me.
> But now on Vista, TortoiseSVN doesn't seem able to call TortoiseMerge,
> or the external program either -- I've triple-checked the path to the
> WinMerge executable and it's valid. I used the Browse... button to
> get to it in the TortoiseSVN options dialog.

I can not reproduce this. I first thought that it might have something
to do with you using Vista x64, but even if I try it on my Visty x64
partition, it works as expected.
So there must be something messed up on your system/installation which
causes this.

The error "the directory name is invalid" is thrown by the
CreateProcess() API if the 'current working directory' parameter points
to something bogus. But that could only happen if for some unknown
reason, the GetCurrentDirectory() API would return that bogus data, and
I can't see how that could happen.

[Ghost]

Well, for what it's worth, I got a message saying there was an update
available today. So I upgraded to the latest version of TortoiseSVN,
and it seems to work okay now. I had tried uninstalling and
reinstalling before and it didn't work then, but this upgrade seemed
to do the trick! Now both TortoiseMerge and the external tool work
fine.

Thanks for the insight, though!

--Mike