Re: announce: git browser

From: Artem Khodush <greenkaa@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 5, 2005, 01:20 UTC
Message-ID: <40b2b7d90512041720i65f63ee1pcfe32d2c0c3c357b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20051205004238.GE22159@pasky.or.cz>

On 12/5/05, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> > See http://straytree.com/git-browser/GitBrowser.html?r=git
>
>   quite interesting! I always dreamt (not intensively enough to go
> myself and do it) about gitweb having gitk-like visualization, possibly
> this might help. ;-)
>
>   Couple of initial notes:
>
>   * I would find it much nicer if you wouldn't "squeeze" all the day's
> (except merge) commits together, but left them separate. Possibly a
> switch to squeeze them, but I'm really not sure if it's even useful to
> have.

Well it's easy to do, but then, in Linus tree, a single day would not fit
on my screen :-) So 'squeezed' mode is helpful for me, at least,
 to get big picture at a glance - in git tree, for example, I can see
the 0.99.5 release branch to  begin and end on a single screen.

>   * The line graphics etc. might be more colourful and prettier. ;-)

And the question is: the colours are assigned to what: branches ? authors ? committers ? repositories ?

>   * Then it could have a "gitk mode" where the time flows vertically and
> author+title+time is shown in each line. It turns out that this might
> not be the prettiest, but it's really the most informative and useful
> view, IMHO.

But in this view, you can have only the number-of-lines-on-the-screen commits visible. And with graphics done in javascript, scrolling is painfully slow, at least in mozilla. And I think that implementing quick search in a diagram will provide much more information than one can get by 'visual grep' :-). So I don't know, need to think a bit more .

Show 6 quoted lines

>   * When I click on the little black box, the commit window disappears
> before I manage to click on anything inside; I would intuitively expect
> the reverse behaviour - that this happens when I don't click on the box.
> Or that clicking on the box does not matter. *shrug* The web interface
> with those windows popping up admitelly makes my mind somewhat
> uncomfortable, but it's hard to pin-point down why.

Yep, the boxes intentionally are not clickable, I think it makes navigation easier, perhaps it could be made as a preference..

>   * Possibly, the commit information could be shown in a dedicated
> screen area altogether. It also wouldn't obscure the view of the actual
> diagram, and it would be more visible that it cutely highlights the
> appropriate box based on the current commit you have your cursor on.

Yes I also think about it. Initially the boxes were semi-transparent so you could track the highlihgt under the box, it looked very nice, but that was too slow to be usable on my computer, and opera does not have that 'opacity' thing..

>   * It looks too much like Feynman diagrams when the merge arrow
> points slightly backwards; perhaps you could try to avoid that.

If I find a way to do it without further complicating placement algorightm, maybe..

>   * It doesn't seem to handle the UTF8 characters properly

>   Quite nice for starters, though! The diff viewer looks pretty slick,
> too.

Thanks! Btw, I took the diff viewer pretty much unmodified from gitweb.

Artem.