Hammond: Looking Back on Review Board [LWN.net]

On his blog, Christian Hammond looks back at three-and-a-half years of development on the code review tool, Review Board. "Attempt #3. I decided to build our own diff parser and generator from scratch. What a project. I knew nothing about diff generation and hardly knew where to start. I spent probably a good month or so just trying to work on this new diff code, and was so close to giving up so many times. It ended up being completely worth it, though, as we ended up with a very nice, extensible diff parser. [...] Without that third attempt, we'd be in the stone age. Review Board would not be as nice to use. We wouldn't have inter-line diffs (where we highlight what changed in a replace line), syntax highlighting, move detection (coming in 1.5), or function/class headers (where we show which function/class the part of the diff is in — also coming in 1.5)."

(Log in to post comments)

off-topic

Posted May 7, 2010 8:38 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Completely off-topic, sorry for that, but...

Does anybody else think that the arrangement in the reviewboard web is a great idea? I mean, those boxes with 4 options each... I would like something like this in Open Office! instead of an imitation of the ribbon interface, pre-drop down each menu showing the three or four options used more often. And allow them to be stacked vertically, so I can make better use of my wide screen!