Changeset commenting

[polarfox@…]

Commenting on changesets would be great, it would substitute for code review tools.

[anonymous]

This would actually pave the way for analysis of percentage of reviewed code. An algorithm could try to correlate all latest lines of code in a file to reviews, and calculate how many were reviewed. I wish SCM systems could help here, because they already have some of that algorithm's bits when they re-create a given revision of a file based on changes preceding it.

[Christian Boos]

Yes, I made a similar proposal, for generalizing comments to all Trac objects (see TracObjectModelProposal, it's a bit dusty now, but I'll update it in the following weeks).

For the specific purpose of code review, I see the need for some more additions:

• simpler linking to the filenames concerned by the changeset (see #124)
• wiki syntax for linking to line numbers.
  As we will support the peg revision format (see #2011), why not use the # delimiter to refer to the line number? … or the : delimiter, for not introducing an incompatible change? (I'll open a new ticket for that feature, but we already have half of the features, i.e. the anchors to the lines, see #1798)
• complement the blame feature with review annotations (see #629)

[antranig@…]

I think the Object Model proposal sounds great. I am currently deciding between Confluence and Trac for a project I am working on, and a big win of Confluence is that it allows comments to be attached to arbitrary pages. Of course a big loss is its terrible UI model, so I am still undecided. I would like very much to be able to enable/disable blog-style comments on each page in Trac.

[Emmanuel Blot]

Have a look at the AddComment macro: it's a useful tool to add comments to a wiki page. However, this does not relate much to the original subject of this ticket.

[Christian Boos]

(changing the status, as I've not actually started to work on that yet)

[Matthew Good]

#2520 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[Christian Boos]

See also TracDev/Proposals/Journaling.

In that perspective, comments would be stored in a separate comment table,

tid

type

id

text

replyto

And the replyto would refer to the tid of the "replied to" comment, if there's one.

[Christian Boos]

There's also the related idea expressed in #4279, which is being able to annotate any given page. That would be even more adapted for code reviews.

The Discussion tab would be more appropriate for general comments about the resource.

Now I wonder if the two ideas couldn't be combined: in case a general comment is referring to some particular location in the resource, there could be an indicator at that location which could link back to the specific comment.

[Christian Boos]

#4313 was marked as duplicate, and actually illustrates quite nicely what I said above.

[bill.mill@…]

Well, as the author of the above dupe (sorry), I'll just change my ticket to a vote for this feature. It would be killer!

(I just wanted it again today, which reminded me to head back here to check the status of my ticket :)

[Christian Boos]

#5133 was closed as duplicate, and was also requesting the ability to annotate changesets for code review purpose.

[az@…]

just to add another little bit of emphasis: this is one of the things i miss most with trac, since we're using the timeline to review each others changes constantly, and having to create tickets for commenting other changes is some cumbersome… :)

[Christian Boos]

You convinced me ;-)

[az@…]

Replying to az@zitc.de:

commenting other changes is some cumbersome… :)

that should have read "commenting other changesets is somewhat cumbersome", of course… :)

[az@…]

Replying to cboos:

You convinced me ;-)

excellent, i'm very much looking forward to it! :)

[osimons]

#8092 closed as duplicate.

[Christian Boos]

See also comment:4:ticket:4048.

[interstellar.condition@…]

#8771 closed as duplicate.

[viola@…]

May I draw your attention to yet another hack addressing this issue? We are impressed by the simplicity by which this could be achieved via a plugin. The hack is not final and not feature-rich yet, but (release early;-) shows the idea.

[viola@…]

Sorry, I should add the address: ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/CodeReviewPlugin

[Christian Boos]

​http://blog.gitorious.org/2009/11/06/awesome-code-review

Which makes me think that it would be nice if the changeset commenting logic could also apply to patches.

[Christian Boos]

Another source of inspiration: ​http://www.reviewboard.org/screenshots/

[Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>]

There are two other code review tools discussed on tho that seem to be of interest to users, ​trachacks:#2661 and ​trachacks:#5889.

I also recently came across ​GvnTrac. I wasn't previously aware of this project because there is not a stub page on tho for it. At present, there appear to be 3 codereview plugins that integrate with Trac: ​th:CodeReviewPlug, ​th:PeerReviewPlugin, and ​GvnTrac.

[Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>]

Came across another code review tool for Trac and added a stub page to t-h.o: ​th:ExoWebCodeReviewPlugin. It was discussed in ​this StackOverflow thread.

[Christian Boos]

See also TracDev/Proposals/AdvancedWikiOperations#Commentsperparagraph

[Peter Suter]

#11676 proposes a reusable comment module that could be used to implement changeset comments.