A test of merging two big files in Linux

Update: "Beyond Compare" it is. Certainly for big files weighing in MBs it's the clear winner since meld just craaaaaawls. Unfortunately you get only 30 days of eval period with Beyond Compare and it's paid after that. But for anybody doing serious amount of compare and merge "Beyond Compare" may prove to e good investment. Otherwise for all us fellows who just occasionally merge things "Meld" it is!

I contribute to Ubuntu Translations. Recently a curious thing happened. While going through some translations I noticed that there are some projects where upstream translations are available. But those are not yet imported in Ubuntu packages available on Launchpad.

One such package was inkscape. When I checked the upstream website for inkscape I found that in trunk there's a translation available and there is a lot of work done.

So I downloaded the po file from there and tried to upload it to Launchpad. Rosetta(Launchpad Translations Management System) declined with note that Launchpad po files contain custom tags, which the upstream translation did not have.

So I decided to go at it the hard way - manually merge the files and upload the updated Launchpad copy. This I found out to be tough task since the files are 1.4MB and all linux merge softwares fairly suck at big file merging.

Meld was creeping and took about couple of minutes (:D) to load the files. Merging was slow with every change taking upto 10secs to refresh the UI.
Kompare also failed where similar behaviour was observed. I didn't try any other tool since these two are the mainline tools.

Finally I cleaned up the upstream po file removing unwanted text like fuzzy markers and easing the load a bit. After this cleanup I'm now able to merge the files using meld. But it's still creepy crawly. But at least not as bad as before.

Incidently I came to know about Linux version of Beyond Compare. It's a paid software. But I downloaded it anyway. Funnily enough it works great. I could move around with no delay and the merging is very fast. Lets see how it works out. Certainly beats meld though!!!

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