Re: suggestions for gitweb

From: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Date: May 14, 2007, 01:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20070514010831.GH4489@pasky.or.cz>
In-Reply-To: <20070513000151.GT14859@MichaelsNB>

Hi,

On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 02:01:52AM CEST, Michael Niedermayer wrote:

Show 28 quoted lines

> On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 03:39:25PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Michael Niedermayer <michaelni@gmx.at> writes:
> > 
> > > * gitweb uses many terms which are new to a non git user, and while
> > >   devlopers who work on ffmpeg will very likely very quickly have
> > >   figured out the meaning of all of them. i think simple users who just
> > >   want to browse the ffmpeg code will have their problems, so i belive 
> > >   a small help text linked to from all pages which contains a short
> > >   definition of all the git(web) specific terms would be very helpfull
> > >   something like
> > >     blob        - file      at a specific revission/date
> > >     tree        - directory at a specific revission/date
> > >     (short) log - project wide commit log
> > >     history     - short log equivalent for a file or directory
> > 
> > Coming fron non-CVS camp, I think changing this to non-git terms
> > is very harmful than educating users who are migrating from
> > other systems.
> 
> you must missunderstand me :(
> i want to educate them, but i cannot as iam not speaking about ffmpeg
> developers/contributors but rather random people who are curious and 
> want to take a look at the ffmpeg source
> 
> for them a simple help link similar to "ViewVC Help" which viewvc has
> on the bottom right of its pages would be great IMHO
> also the text above is a pure random suggestion by a svn user and was
> not intended to redefine any git terms

  I seriously doubt the usefulness of this. Meaning of all the links except
maybe blob seems immediately obvious for me, even if I try to imagine
that I know nothing about Git; maybe I'm wrong here, I might try to do
an experiment. :-)

  But, even if that's the case, when a new user meets gitweb and looks
at the 'history' link, what do you think she will do? Start hunting the
page for some link to a glossary? I yet have to see a user like that :-)
- I will bet that she just clicks at the link and figures out what it is
about based on what happenned.

Show 23 quoted lines

> > > * The blame page shows the SHA1 for each hunk and IMHO thats the last thing
> > >   i would want to see first, id be much more interrested in by whom and
> > >   when a given change was done, iam wondering in which case the SHA1 would
> > >   be usefull? copy-paste onto your command line git tools but then why
> > >   use gitweb at all, 'git blame' would make more sense IMHO and a simple
> > >   click would reveal the sha1 with more info anyway ...
> > 
> > They serve no purpose other than showing something to click on,
> > and allow you to hover over (some people argued in the past
> > that they recognize certain commit object names, but honestly I
> > would not believe them).  However, I do not think there are much
> > better alternatives.  Try coming up with a different "label"
> > string that is of uniform length across commits, and does not
> > chew up too much screen real estate.
> 
> trivial
> the first N chars of the username + YYMMDD
> 
> so for example:
> michaeln070612
> 
> or with space:
> michaeln 070612

This idea occurred to me, but so if a file is born from 20 commits in a single day, you have no distinction between them. And if you throw time in the mix too, it already becomes way too long; I'd argue that even username-date already feels too long.

Show 9 quoted lines

> [...]
> > > * on the history page there are "blob", "commitdiff" and "diff to current"
> > >   the obvious missing one is "diff to previous" which would be the diff to
> > >   the previous blob of this file
> > 
> > Isn't that commitdiff, or commitdiff on that page does not limit
> > the diff to the blob?
> 
> commitdiff doesnt limit it to the blob ...

I don't know if it's better to limit commitdiff or not; a compromise approach would be not to limit it but to jump to the fragment concerning the given blob.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. // Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
		-- Samuel Beckett