Mercurial history browsing

Project Name

Browser Based UI for Mercurial History Browsing (hgweb)

Project Description

We're just starting to use an exciting new distributed version control tool: Mercurial.

One of the exciting things about Mercurial is that the history—the list of all the changes that have ever been checked in—is not linear. It frequently has branches and merges. This is actually a good, important feature, as you know if you've read a little about distributed version control. The downside is that the history becomes a maze of twisty little passages. Benjamin Smedberg's demo shows the history of a repository with lots of merges (each box is a check-in; you can click on the boxes to move around).

There have been a couple attempts at showing history in an intuitive, graphical way. Mercurial comes with a web UI for browsing the repository, including history (here's what it looks like). It also comes with an "hg glog" extension that draws history as ASCII art, and an "hg view" extension that does roughly the same thing with a little GUI. Sadly, none of these applications qualifies as awesome.

Your mission is to rectify this sad situation by writing an awesome browser-based UI for navigating Mercurial repository history.

Resources: jorendorff, bsmedberg

Project Leader(s)

Siddharth Kalra

Project Contributor(s)

There are no contributors at this time

Project Details

September 23rd, 2008

• Chat with jorendorff

1. We have to make sure you understand hg
2. we have to decide on some very small thing that you can get running very soon
3. we should talk it over and make sure it's clear how to do it
4. we should plan to meet up later and brainstorm some, once you've had a chance to play around with hg

• Ideas from the blog post by jorendorff
  • jorendorff's ideas
    • History scroll forever, up and down. Something like a tumblelog
    • Able to identify whether what one is looking at is in the mainline or a branch
      • Major lines of development color coded i.e. blue for mozilla-central, orange for tracemonkey etc...
      • This is possible using information from those repos’ pushlogs
    • Pushlog info could be used to make those special paths relatively straight, with other smaller branches and mini-merges happening to the side or hidden by default with some sort of collapse/expand widget
    • Show more info about each changeset, but only in an unobtrusive way
      • Be able to know which dirs were touched and roughly the size of the diffs
    • Be able to filter the history by file or dir
    • A vertical timeline
      • Location of a changeset on screen would tell something about when it was developed or pushed
    • Be able to zoom in and out and see weeks, months, years of work
    • Showing dates of when changes were "pushed" to mozilla-central, not the dates they were "committed"
      • This makes the history linear and to some degree shows if a merge is big or small
  • Jesse Ruderman Ideas
    • Consider starting with the pushloghtml page, which the Moz community seems to use, rather than the shortlog page
  • Gc Ideas
    • Search history restricted to a particular data range and dirs
      • because when a bug is found to start on a particular build from a month ago, need to find what was changed since the previous build, in relevant dirs
  • RyanVM Ideas
    • Be able to view more than 10 entries at a time in the changelog
  • Jonas Sicking Ideas
    • Uses HG web to digg thorugh logs for a given file
      • Wondering "why was this code changed" or "what is this code trying to do"
      • Today it is painful to dig this info up
    • HG Blame allows you to see
      • who last changed a given line, but many times that is just cleanup patches that don't change the functionality
      • ability to see who made changes that actually changed the functionality
    • Bonsai had better functionality
      • Showed checkin comment for every given line and jump to that revision
      • You could then manually step on revision back since the version numbers were numeric
    • HG log should be able contain links to the previous version for every line
  • Boris
    • Bonsai had the feature of being able to see the list of files touched by a checkin

Project News

September 18th, 2008

• Picked the Mercurial History Browsing project

September 23rd, 2008

• Chatted with jorendorff about starting on the project
• Jorendorff made a blog post calling for ideas about the project

External Links

• Distributed Version Control
• Mercurial
• Mercurial Basics
• mercurial-central shortlog page
• graph view
• better shortlog