Long delay and many terminal windows before launching Meld

[Joe-Wasserman]

Thank you for integrating Meld with RStudio! I noticed a couple of related possible issues:

1. It takes a long time to launch Meld after selecting "Compare with Repo" from the addins menu in RStudio.
2. Launching Meld from the addins menu rapidly opens and closes dozens of git.exe terminals, effectively preventing the user from doing anything else while Meld opens.

I think these are related, hence submitting a single issue. Is this expected (perhaps OS-specific) behavior? Is it Meld's behavior, and not specific to {compareWith}?

R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods  
[7] base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_1.0.6            compiler_4.0.4       
 [3] pillar_1.6.0          sys_3.4              
 [5] tools_4.0.4           packrat_0.6.0        
 [7] jsonlite_1.7.2        memoise_2.0.0        
 [9] lifecycle_1.0.0       tibble_3.1.0         
[11] pkgconfig_2.0.3       rlang_0.4.10         
[13] reprex_1.0.0          DBI_1.1.1            
[15] rstudioapi_0.13       curl_4.3             
[17] fastmap_1.1.0         dplyr_1.0.5          
[19] httr_1.4.2            stringr_1.4.0        
[21] xml2_1.3.2            generics_0.1.0       
[23] fs_1.5.0              vctrs_0.3.7          
[25] tidyselect_1.1.0      glue_1.4.2           
[27] R6_2.5.0              fansi_0.4.2          
[29] purrr_0.3.4           selectr_0.4-2        
[31] magrittr_2.0.1        ellipsis_0.3.1       
[33] assertthat_0.2.1      rvest_1.0.0          
[35] V8_3.4.0              rdocsyntax_0.4.1.9000
[37] utf8_1.2.1            compareWith_0.0.1    
[39] stringi_1.5.3         cachem_1.0.4         
[41] crayon_1.4.1         

[riccardoporreca]

@mymil, Thanks for reporting, and for your interest in compareWith.

I have experienced the same in the past on Windows, and this is related to Meld's behavior on Windows and as such should be pretty unrelated to compareWith.

In order to confirm this, you can launch Meld version control comparison directly from the RStudio "Terminal" via meld . (compares the whole directory) or meld <file> (for single-file). You should experience the same behavior, both in terms of delayed response and quick terminal windows.

Note that the same should also occur if you just launch Meld normally as a program and start a new version control comparison.

I am closing the issue, but feel free to reopen it if you experience some unexpected behavior.

This is something we may want to add to the package README, but for the time being it is already nice to have this issue as a reference.