How to compare two versions of ORCHIDEE

Author: M. McGrath and J. Ghattas

Last revision: 2020/02/28, M. McGrath

If you would like to integrate the differences between one version of ORCHIDEE (such as the trunk, or a branch, or someone's personal copy) and your local copy, please see ​this page. If you simply want to see the differences, the text below shows you two different ways to do it.

There are times when you want to know what has changed between a version you are working on and a version someone else has in SVN. For example, someone told you about a cool feature in the OCN branch and you want to see how difficult it would be to put it into your personal copy. Such an action requires first to see how many differences there are between the version you are working on and the version of interest.

The most important thing you need to know here is if you can actually access the version you are trying to merge with. If you go onto the Wiki under the Browse Source label (​http://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/browser), you can see all the versions you have access to. If you can't see a version, you don't have access. Be sure to find the location of the ORCHIDEE directory in the branch/personal folder that you are looking at.

Note that you cannot see differences between versions that have not been committed to svn. So, if someone makes modifications to the trunk but never does "svn commit", you cannot see those differences with these methods.

You can easily compare a local version (with changes that were not commited) with the same branch on the SVN repository. Use the commands "svn stat", "svn -u stat", "svn diff", etc. More detail is found in this .pdf of ​SVN and ORCHIDEE in 10 minutes. The commands below are to compare the either two versions (branches) svn to each other, or to compare the modifications that you have made in your local directory to a different branch.

Graphical method using the web interface

The source code of all versions of ORCHIDEE that you have access to can be seen ​here. Make sure you are logged in. The "View changes" buttom a the bottom will allow you to select two different branches and different revisions.

This only works for changes that have been committed to SVN.

Command line method

If you prefer the command line, you can use "svn diff". You will need to find the svn address of the version of ORCHIDEE that you are trying to compare against (​this page has something short about that.

   svn diff svn://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/trunk/ORCHIDEE svn://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/branches/ORCHIDEE-CN-CAN/ORCHIDEE

to compare the trunk against the branch CN-CAN. Or

   svn diff svn://forge.ipsl.fr/orchidee/trunk/ORCHIDEE MYDIRECTORY/modeles/ORCHIDEE

to see differences between the trunk and a version of ORCHIDEE that you have extracted locally into MYDIRECTORY.