Comments on: What should we change about the Mercurial Web UI?

By: Martijn

Martijn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:18:42 +0000

I would like to see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448707 fixed.
It’s really difficult now to find out which patch caused a regression. This was much, much easier with bonsai queries.

Also, I really miss the blame view that bonsai had.

By: Cork

Cork — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:11:01 +0000

It would be nice if the checkin could have links to official builds built from that changeset.

That is link to the ftp folder of the builds if the files exists. This would make it easier to test changes and find regression ranges.

By: Clint

Clint — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:40:06 +0000

I have not played with the current hg page much, only to do date-searches for regression ranges.

I like the suggestions above about making it much easier to do date-range queries. My biggest use case here is to hunt down regression ranges, so anything to make that easier would be appreciated.

Additionally, being able to query by the person that checked in the patch and by source code directory would be super helpful, as I used those features in bonsai quite a bit.

By: Boris

Boris — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:08:46 +0000

One other comment. I just filed a bug on hg annotate being really slow: see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/bts/issue1310

By: Boris

Boris — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:49:16 +0000

In addition to what Jonas said, bonsai had the nice feature of being able to easily see the list of files touched by a checkin. This would be really nice in hg as well; I used to actually skim the bonsai log looking for changes the files I cared about and looking through the diffs…

By: jorendorff

jorendorff — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:08:12 +0000

Nice point, Jesse.

Sid, Ted Mielczarek did another “better shortlog” page, which you can see here:

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?startdate=sep+10+2008&enddate=now

The most important thing here is that the dates it’s showing you are the dates those changes were *pushed* to mozilla-central, not the dates they were *committed*. As Jesse mentions the commit dates aren’t very useful.

This makes the history linear (a huge relief) and to some degree makes it obvious when a merge is big and when it’s little.

By: Jonas Sicking

Jonas Sicking — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:03:58 +0000

The thing that I use HG web for the most is digging through logs for a given file.

Specifically, I find myself looking at some piece of code wondering “why was this code written this way” or “what is this code trying to do”.

Today it is quite painful do dig that information up. HG Blame allows you to see who last changed a given line, but often times that is generic cleanup patches that didn’t actually change the functionality. So you have to figure out the revision before that change by looking at the HG log and go to the previous revision, then find the code again, and repeat the process until you find the last patch to make a functional change.

Bonsai was somewhat better in this regard. It at least showed you the checkin comment for every given line and jump to that revision. You could then manually step one revision further back since the version numbers were numeric.

It would be great if the HG log page contained links to the previous version for every line.

By: RyanVM

RyanVM — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:56:10 +0000

It would be nice if I could view more than 10 entries at a time in the changelog.

By: Gc

Gc — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:47:43 +0000

Search history restricted to a particular date range and directories. (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 directories)

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:17:32 +0000

You might consider starting with the pushloghtml page, which is what the Mozilla community seems to use, rather than the shortlog page, which isn’t very useful to begin with.