Re: suggestions for gitweb

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: May 12, 2007, 22:39 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8xbtwtsy.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070512205529.GS14859@MichaelsNB>

Michael Niedermayer <michaelni@gmx.at> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> * 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.

> * The color of adjacent blame "hunks" is so similar that its
>   indistinguishable on my notebook TFT when iam looking at it from slightly
>   above

This is more or less intentional to make the difference not too distracting. I thought it was controlled via css which something you can use browser side tricks to suite your taste?

Show 6 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.

> * i either cant find the long history for a file or there is none ("history"
>   is like "short log" and "log" is not file specific) a "long history" link
>   in addition to "history" would be nice

Probably.

> * 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?

> * the history/log pages could contain some statistics for the commits like
>   the number of files changed and lines added/removed

Probably.

The three last items should be relatively easy, if somebody is interested. Pasky, Jakub, what do you think?