Include edits to ticket comments as events in the timeline

[Ryan J Ollos]

I'd find it useful to have edits to ticket comments displayed as events in the timeline. This would result in the events also being displayed in the timeline RSS feed, and we'd be able to see when a significant change is made to a ticket comment.

Email notifications on changes to ticket comments may also be desirable, but that can be addressed in another ticket. It has already been requested in #10909.

TODO Revise TracTickets#ChangingandCommentingTickets.

[Remy Blank]

Just FTR, we discussed this when I initially implemented comment edits, and decided against it, because edits were intended for small changes (e.g. typos or formatting fixes). So adding edits to the timeline would only pollute it. The same reasoning applied to notifications on edits.

What's the use case for notifying (via the timeline and / or email) about comment edits?

Keep in mind that comment edits are allowed only if at least one of the following applies:

• You are authenticated and edit your own comment.
• You have TICKET_EDIT_COMMENT.

[Ryan J Ollos]

The issue of too much information in the timeline seems like a reasonable concern. I would suggest adding a configuration option to control whether edits are displayed in the timeline, but I think that would violate Trac's goal of being minimalist and keeping a reasonable number of configuration options. Maybe I should just explore if this can be implemented in a plugin.

The use case is that in one of the Trac instances I use we tend to edit comments with significant changes from time to time in order to keep the ticket history clean. For example, sometimes I'll write a comment and realize shortly after that it is wrong, and then completely change it in an edit. We prefer to do this rather than add follow-up comments because the tickets are reviewed frequently and used as notes for design history, so keeping a clean history in the ticket is desirable. I use the RSS feed to monitor activity in the Trac instance, so in those cases it would be nice to see when comments have been edited. The benefit might be outweighed by the level of noise generated though, as you've suggested.

[Remy Blank]

Replying to rjollos:

The issue of too much information in the timeline seems like a reasonable concern. I would suggest adding a configuration option to control whether edits are displayed in the timeline, but I think that would violate Trac's goal of being minimalist and keeping a reasonable number of configuration options.

This wouldn't need to be a configuration option. The timeline can already be configured by the user with the checkboxes at the top-right, so you could add another one for "Ticket comment edits" and have it disabled by default.

Your use case sounds reasonable, FWIW.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Adding another timeline filter seems like a good way to implement the feature. I'll investigate.