当我们开发 TortoiseSVN 时发现，只要用户发送补丁增强这个项目，或者只是修正问题，我们就需要为应用这些补丁付出许多工作量。并且很多时候，这些补丁是过时的，不能使用命令行工具 http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ 打补丁，因为我们正在修改这些文件，有时候已经修改了。

这也是最初的 TortoiseSVN 没有实现 TortoiseSVN → 创建补丁 的主要理由：我们期望用户发送给我们整个文件，这样容易打补丁。

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.