While working on TortoiseSVN we found that whenever users sent in patches to enhance the project or just to fix bugs, we had a lot of work just applying those patches. And many times those patches were outdated and couldn't be applied with the command line patch tool https://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ because we were working on those files and had sometimes changed those files already.
To je tudi glavni vzrok, zakaj program TortoiseSVN na začetku ni ponujal ukaza → : raje smo videli, da so nam uporabniki pošiljali celotne datoteke, saj jih je bilo lažje uporabiti kot popravke.
Veliko časa smo zapravili za iskanje ustreznega grafičnega orodja na internetu, vendar smo lahko ugotovili le, da ne obstaja. Da skrajšamo celotno zgodbo: če nam nihče ne omogoča takšnega orodja, ga bomo morali napisati sami. Tako se je rodil program TortoiseMerge.
Ker TortoiseSVN že uporablja knjižnice sistema Subversion, ki imajo vgrajeno dobro orodje za razlikovanje, je bila odločitev za uporabo teh knjižnic namesto sistema GNU diff enostavna.
Subversion 1.7 introduced the svn patch command which allows to apply a patch file to a working copy. TortoiseMerge uses now the same functions as the Subversion command to avoid different behaviors between the two.