Search within changeset contents(diffs)

[Ryan J Ollos]

I find the labeling of the checkbox Changesets on the search page is a bit misleading. One might expect the search to include the content of the changesets (text and/or property modifications of files from the version control system), whereas only the Revision Properties are searched (Author, Revision, and Message, as can be seen here​).

Initially I thought it might be best to change the label from Changesets → Revision logs for consistency with terminology used in Trac, namely: TracRevisionLog, however:

• The term Revision logs might imply results would contain a link to the RevisionLog page, whereas a link to a changeset is returned in the search results.
• CHANGESET_VIEW permission is required to obtain search results for this checkbox, as can be seen here​

so this suggestions could be similarly confusing.

The best alternative I could come up with is to rename the checkbox to Revision properties, which is a term consistently used to refer to Subversion revision properties (i.e. revision meta-data). However, a search shows that this term is not used anywhere in the Trac documentation to refer to Changelog properties, so it might be inconsistent with terminology used in Trac. It also appears that Trac is leaning towards supporting Mercurial and other vc backends, and I'm not sure what terminology is typically used with those VC systems.

Another alternative would be to label the checkbox Changeset properties. The downside I see with both Revision properties and Changeset properties is that the terms are a bit long and might disrupt the nice layout of the Search page.

I hope I am not making too big of a deal about a small thing, but little things like this that need clarification seem to eat up a lot of my time answering questions from developers, and reduce user efficiency using the system.

Ultimately, this comes down to either a one-line change​ or closing this as won't fix, so I set it for milestone:0.12.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>:

I find the labeling of the checkbox Changesets on the search page is a bit misleading. One might expect the search to include the content of the changesets (text and/or property modifications of files from the version control system)

I think that if Trac (or a plugin) one day allows to search for changeset's content, and if that becomes separate from the Changesets filter, the new filter could be named Diffs. I see no compelling reason to change the current convention which is certainly familiar to most now. I'd even favor not distinguishing searching on changeset metadata and changeset data, as in both cases a match will lead you to the same "page".

Ultimately, this comes down to either a one-line change​ or closing this as won't fix, so I set it for milestone:0.12.

While I'd would lean to answering wontfix to that question, I actually think this ticket could be kept as a reminder for extending the Changesets search scope to changesets diffs, and therefore targeted to some future milestone…

[Remy Blank]

Also -1 for changing the current label. And don't we have a ticket already for searching in file content? Or was that attachments?

[Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>]

Replying to cboos:

I think that if Trac (or a plugin) one day allows to search for changeset's content, and if that becomes separate from the Changesets filter, the new filter could be named Diffs. I see no compelling reason to change the current convention which is certainly familiar to most now. I'd even favor not distinguishing searching on changeset metadata and changeset data, as in both cases a match will lead you to the same "page".

The more I think about it, it seems like it is just one of those things that one needs to know (from reading the documentation or via their SCM admin), like you suggest.

I made a minor revision to the TracSearch documentation page to clarify this point: wiki/TracSearch.

I was wondering if TracSearch should be listed in the TracGuide table of contents, since it is one of the major Trac modules. Currently, it appears that there are just a handful of pages that link to TracSearch, namely TracLinks, TracPermissions, and TracAccessibility. TracSearch seems to be "buried" a bit in the documentation.

[Ryan Ollos <ryano@…>]

Replying to rblank:

Also -1 for changing the current label. And don't we have a ticket already for searching in file content? Or was that attachments?

Looks like you might be referring to #5589. I ran a custom query, but didn't find anything associated with searching changesets.

I have no idea what it would take to implement this feature, but after looking at the ​th:RepoSearchPlugin, it seems like there are some pretty challenging issues to work out with this feature.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to rblank:

Also -1 for changing the current label. And don't we have a ticket already for searching in file content? Or was that attachments?

We have one for searching the content of attachments, yes (#5589) and several others for searching source file content, all closed pointing to ​TracHacks:wiki:RepoSearchPlugin, which, given its current status, isn't a very satisfying answer …

But here, it's specific to content of the diffs, which might be useful to see e.g. when a function has changed. Though the more I think about it, this would probably warrant a Diffs checkbox on its own…

[Christian Boos]

Milestone 2.0 deleted

[Remy Blank]

Changing the summary according to comment:1.