Earlier this week, a coworker was doing a Subversion merge conflict resolution because he and another dev modified the same file. That got me thinking how freakin' sweet it would be if Subversion knew about potential conflicts in my working copy sooner than commit time. My idea was to have a running process on each dev machine that talked home to the server on an interval (maybe 1 minute) to tell it which files I've modified and find out what files other developers have modified but not committed. Well apparently Dennis Byrne had the same idea a few months ago and created Conflict:

Conflict notifies a software developer of potential conflicts between his/her work and that of other developers, before the commit.

Conflict is an open source project composed of two parts: Conflict clients and a Conflict server. A Conflict client is a transparent process running on the workstation of each developer. It stays in the background, reporting local file system changes to the Conflict server. When the Conflict server detects a conflict between two or more developers, each developer is notified. The Conflict project improves feedback and communication while encouraging developers to check in code frequently.

    I'm finding this at 11:15 and I'm supposed to be going to bed but instead I will be tossing and turning thinking about playing with this shiny new toy tomorrow. Found via blogs.thoughtworks.com, which I found via Jeremy Miller's blogroll while reading about StructureMap. Now I have two new tools to learn how to use this week.