Tijekom rada na TortoiseSVN primjetili smo da imamo dosta posla kad nam korisnici pošalju zakrpu kako bi ispravili neku grešku ili unaprijedili program. I u mnogo slučajeva zakrpe su bili zastarjele i nismo ih mogli primjeniti koristeći komandnolinijski alat http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ zato jer smo i sami promjenili iste datoteke.

To je bio i glavni razlog zašto TortoiseSVN nije odmah u početku imao naredbu TortoiseSVN → Izradii zakrpu: zapravo nam je bilo jednostavnije primjeniti izmjene kad od korisnika dobijemo cijele datoteke.

So we spent a lot of time, searching the Internet for a GUI tool which could apply patch files, but all we found was that such a tool didn't exist. So to cut a long story short: We decided that if no-one else could provide such a tool we would have to write our own. That's when TortoiseMerge was born.

Since TortoiseSVN already uses the Subversion library, which has a nice diffing engine built in, it was just natural to use this library instead of the GNU diff.