Diffscuss – Code reviews in plain text

by nazri1 • 12 years ago

80 18 12 years ago

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

Curious why you resorted to email diffs around instead of using pull requests on GitHub? It would be cool to see this integrated with the GitHub API so I could push out my comments to GitHub after editing.

kelnos• 12 years ago

Probably because they aren't using GitHub internally.

tomheon7• 12 years ago

Hey there, one of the diffscuss authors here.

We were working for a client who used self-hosted svn and had no code review system.

As for GitHub API: there's a (beta-ish) import from a pull request into a diffscuss file ("diffscuss github-import" for more), but currently nothing to push it back, which is a tricky problem (since what's displayed on a github pull request is actually a mixture of pull request comments and comments made directly on the commit diffs). But if there's sufficient interest we'll take a look!

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

If the tricky part is that comments are a picture of PR comments and diff comments, it seems like that would be more of a problem for import than export.

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

This looks promising. I'd love to see this integrated with gerrit and similar, to provide a two-way bridge between Gerrit change comments and email.

scrollaway2• 12 years ago

This is a fantastic idea! I love it and I'm completely sold. If you manage to get Github to let you export diff comments as this format, you'll really have something there!

tomheon7• 12 years ago

Hey, one of the authors of diffscuss here.

Just FYI, there's a "diffscuss github-import" command (which is beta-ish, but should work) that can import a pull request (or series of pull requests) into diffscuss format.

amdt• 12 years ago

I like the interleaved comments with the header and body format. I wonder if the authors knew that unidiffs already support comment lines? From the PATCH(1) man page:

"After removing indenting or encapsulation, lines beginning with # are ignored, as they are considered to be comments."

tomheon7• 12 years ago

Good question, we did consider using #, the main benefit of which would have been that diffscuss files were still legal diffs.

Against that benefit was the consideration that there could have been comments that weren't diffscuss threads in a diff, and that would have meant that you could have legal diffs that would have terribly confused any diffscuss parsing.

Add to that the fact that you can get a legal diff back just by piping a diffscuss file through a single grep -v, and we decided not to use # (which I think was probably the right call--overloading comment syntax for functional stuff always creeps me out a bit anyway).

hrjet2• 12 years ago

IDK if it's too late to discuss this, but a third possibility could have been to use the second character or more of a # comment as a marker for diffscuss.

Something like: #%%%

You get standard diffs and parsability.

scrollaway2• 12 years ago

I disagree with that decision, FWIW. I think overloading comments with a special syntax such as #%- for example is better than having incompatible formats.

Besides, code reviews essentially are comments.

tiziano88• 12 years ago

Tracking this on GitHub: https://github.com/hut8labs/diffscuss/issues/36

Diffscuss – Code reviews in plain text

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