Re: [RFH] QGit: how to cram a patch in a crowded screen

On Saturday 2007, May 26, Marco Costalba wrote:

While reading this I was reminded of something Linus said recently. The default form for exchanging patches is _not_ the diff; it's the email. The reason for this is that emails contain author information, log information and patch information. I've often thought that one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that the log message will be small. Perhaps then, the best thing would be to show each revision in a similar manner to how one would view the patch as an email as Pavel suggests: all in one. My patches that made the header information appear in a box were a stumble in that direction, making the header look a bit like an email header, what about going one step further and including the patch in that window as well?

For example, the log view widget would show:

<Header> <Log Message> <Patch>

All visually distinct to improve searching by eye (perhaps including clear separators between files patched). Then the file list could include a "<header>" psuedo-file that would jump back to the top of the viewer.

I think a key feature would be that the log message shows up fast, and then the patch is loaded in the background - sometimes patches are big, but you still want to hop around revisions without waiting for the whole patch to load before you leap to the next view point.

Here's another option, keeping the patch tab, but putting the tab widget in the log view window. That way the list would be visible and you would just switch between the log and the patch.

And another idea: make the log window a tree widget, of sorts, a bit like kate in KDE is, each section would begin collapsed (perhaps), it would look like:

 + <Header>
 + <Log message>
 + <Patch>

And clicking on the + would expand that section; then for the patch itself:

 + <Patch>
   + <File1>
   + <File2>
   + <File3>

In this way the user could get an overview of all the changed files, and could view the changes for whatever subset they wanted. It would probably be nice to default the header and log message to expanded, with the option to collapse them.

Andy