7 ms·

Show HN: GitPlex – A new Git repo management server with code review

193 points by robinshen 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago
I don't care much about code review, but it's a close enough attractor to the space of code reading that it seems to be draining attention. So let me hijack this topic and post a request for product (I'd write it myself, but priorities... adult life sucks hard). -- I dream of a tool that facilitates code reading and exploration. It has some similar features with code review tools, namely: - integration with version control systems - basic semantic search/navigation - looks clean - not meant to be for writing code But my dream tool also has following features I haven't seen implemented in any code review tool (or anywhere): - annotations - not just "comments", but the ability to tag lines, to strike them out, highlight, color, scribble on them, etc. - basically anything you'd do with a printout of a code - easy way to review history of a single file (with annotations) - ability to easily bookmark areas / pieces of code and use those bookmarks in comments / annotations - ability for viewing structural diagrams of the codebase - full blown semantic search - who calls, calls who, etc. - project-structure-oriented, not repository-history/commit-oriented Basically, I'd love a tool not for collaboration, but for individual work - a tool that would facilitate exploring and familiarizing yourself with big codebases, as well as empower one when the time comes to do bigger refactorings. Would be doubly useful if I could use it on a tablet, so that I could get up from in front of my computer to go and think about the changes I'm about to make (right now, I end up actually printing code if I have to refactor something very messy).
- sarnowski 10y ago
  Sounds like you described https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ (I am not affiliated with Jetbrains in any way)
  - theptip 10y ago
    I've seen a couple brief comments about Upsource in this thread. Can anyone give a deeper dive on their experiences? I tried it very briefly but didn't have time to configure integration with my IDE, just played in the web browser. I suspect that means I didn't try the best feature. Pros/cons of this tool?
    - leonya2 10y ago
      Upsource team member here. Since Upsource indexes your code just like any JetBrains IDE does, it gives you code navigation, inspections, etc. in the browser, which means its "best features" don't require using it as an IDE plugin. Pros: I'm obviously biased so I won't go into those. Cons: it's not a lightweight tool that's happy with 1 gig of memory. Configuring and waiting for code indexes takes a bit of time, especially if you're trying it out on large legacy codebases. It also won't manage a Git repository for you.
- robinshen 10y ago
  I think GitPlex meets most of the requirement here if you are writing Java code (and more languages are being added). Unlike other tooks, it does not place any requirements on project build system (Maven, Gradle, etc) and can work on any project containing supported languages. Checkout android code base for instance: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?revision=master&path=core/java/android/inputmethodservice/Keyboard.java&mark=61.13-61.21 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?... I actually created this tool to suffice my own needs when browsing history of QuickBuild source code.
- taspeotis 10y ago
  I get the feeling that Microsoft has a lot of these things, but they're disparate. e.g. code navigation [1], search [2] and CodeLens [3]. [1] https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/string.cs,206408f6325aea24 https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/strin... [2] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/search/code/advanced-search#codefunctions https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/search/code/advanced... [3] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn269218.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn269218.aspx
- qznc 10y ago
  > annotations - not just "comments" What kind of annotations would not make sense as comments?
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    Discussions about the code perhaps.
  - Juliate 10y ago
    Annotations as what you scribble in the margin of an article or on a page in a book. Comments are inline with the code. Annotations are aside, and serve both as visual anchors and as "aside" notes.
    - robinshen 10y ago
      Is it something like this? http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?revision=master&path=core/java/android/inputmethodservice/Keyboard.java&mark=138.4-146.48&comment=2 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?... You may also put annotations on any diffs: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit?revision=72d6dca09e85627b47c94f9a6ebf37ea56291450&comment=3&mark=72d6dca09e85627b47c94f9a6ebf37ea56291450:wifi/java/android/net/wifi/p2p/WifiP2pManager.java:286.4-289.7 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit...
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I'm thinking in terms of what I'd do if the code was printed out on paper. http://imgur.com/KMCBMjA http://imgur.com/KMCBMjA
    - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
      The trouble with that is, how on earth do you get the annotations to apply across revisions? Or would you be OK with them only applying to a given revision and then ... what, disappearing? Or going into a 'floating bucket' of annotations for the entire file?
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  > Would be doubly useful if I could use it on a tablet That's something that baffles me: the complete lack of a comfortable (or at least not painful) way to read and annotate source code on Android.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Indeed. The closest I came to what I need was a proof-of-concept I did - printing source code to PDF and using Adobe Reader's annotation tools. Wasn't exactly convenient without a good ability to switch between multiple source files, but could be made to work. I'd love to have such browsing/annotation tool I could take with me to a park, to browse code and think about it while on a walk, without continuous distractions of the office / Internet connection.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  Right now, I would take a button to go to the previous revision of a file, showing the full file with the diff underneath. That way I could very easily 'browse' through the history of a file to find out things like when a particular change got introduced or just get a feel for its history. Why on earth don't github/bitbucket provide this? Surely it's a reasonable and common requirement? Or is there something inherent to git that makes it too awkward?
  - pricechild 10y ago
    Are you looking for something akin to `git blame`? Github & Bitbucket both provide a gui for this. Something even closer to what you're asking for... in github hit the 'history' button on a file (next to blame) and you'll get the commits which affected it. Hit the 7 character commit-id and you'll be taken to the diff of that change, jumped specifically to the file in question.
    - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
      I never really use `git blame` - my primary git use case is as a single user. The history button in github is close to what I'd like, but it's not quite as friendly as single next/previous buttons that just paginate the changes to a file. That makes cycling through the history very easy, whilst 'click commit id, back, remember which commit we just viewed, click following commit id, repeate' all sounds a bit painful.
  - robinshen 10y ago
    GitPlex can show history of any path (a file or directory) quickly via history button, and from there you can even refine the history (search for certain tags, commits made by certain people, etc) of the file, and once you get to the point, you can either view content of the file, or hit the compare button to compare with your previous browsed copy. An example here: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commits?compareWith=836e74052e16f4c24c3e7e9eab0dbcaee462986f&query=path%28core/java/android/view/View.java%29 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit...
  - sdesol 10y ago
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You mean an IDE?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    After a fashion. A reading/exploration-oriented lightweight IDE. No IDE that I know of support scribbling over code, for example. Also, for the mode of work I'm thinking about, having no ability to actually write code would be a feature.
    - 91bananas 10y ago
      Truly you've described this: https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/
- sqs 10y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. We 100% agree, and that's why we built Sourcegraph. Check out our roadmap at https://sourcegraph.com/plan https://sourcegraph.com/plan. And try browsing code on Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/client.go#L94 https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... (we support other languages as well). Right-click on "parseURL" and choose "Find All References". If you click on "HasPrefix" a few lines below, you'll see a cross-repo jump (and the right-click menu lets you see global/cross-repo references). Sign up at https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com to get it on your own GitHub repos.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Very interesting demo. So it has at least one feature I'm looking for :). Basically, I'd like something like that, but with annotations like in Acrobat Reader (but more), on a tablet, and off-line at least for my own codebase. I found a small issue with "peek definition" window: http://imgur.com/TT2KmpR http://imgur.com/TT2KmpR.
    - sqs 10y ago
      Shoot me an email at sqs@sourcegraph.com if you want to get early access to some of the upcoming things (or sign up at https://sourcegraph.com/beta https://sourcegraph.com/beta). I think you'll like what's coming. Thanks for the bug report. :)
  - emirozer 10y ago
    This is very impressive, well done!
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  I recommend you watch this: https://youtu.be/dSqLt8BgbRQ https://youtu.be/dSqLt8BgbRQ
  - robinshen 10y ago
    Thanks for the link, bookmarked it for studying, :)
- dugmartin 10y ago
  I'm building something like that now but instead of annotations in the code it captures your browse through the codebase as a tree that you can then annotate, save and share. It is going to run both in the browser to explore code hosted on GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, etc and locally as an Electron app. Very vague landing page with signup here: http://www.browsethesource.com/ http://www.browsethesource.com/
- Dangeranger 10y ago
  For quick browsing of a files commits I use Emacs with Magit and utilize the time travel feature of Git-Timemachine https://github.com/pidu/git-timemachine https://github.com/pidu/git-timemachine You don't get the annotations you want, but you could make a comment with a common starting word like NOTE: then remove them before you merge the refactorings.
- hkailahi 10y ago
  Yes! This is this tool I've been dreaming of too! I would pay a lot of money for something like this.
- seanpackham 10y ago
  That is a great list of features! I will create feature requests for them in GitLab (I work at GitLab). I'm curious what you think of the single file history in current systems, are they OK but just missing annotations?
grault 10y ago
I'd be in favor of having some standard "code review markup language", which could contain review comments and workflows. Then you would be able to put these in files and make those files part of your repository (ie commit/push). Then, you could build various frontends to handle these in a user friendly way if you like. But also, would be accessible and editable in your favorite text editor.
- blowski 10y ago
  As long as the tools and processes don't get in the way of communication because they require comments to be written in a particular format or in a precise place. Too often, such tools end up in discouraging the very thing they're supposed to help.
- robinshen 10y ago
  We solve this via gatekeeper rules (repository administrator defines rules such as who needs to review which part of code, or whose code needs to be reviewed (intern team for instance needs to be reviewed by core team etc), or what commit message rule should be followed etc. A typical review process suggested by GitPlex can be found here: http://wiki.pmease.com/display/GP10/Iterative+Review+with+Pull+Request http://wiki.pmease.com/display/GP10/Iterative+Review+with+Pu...
- derwildemomo 10y ago
  This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately – I considered extending our git-flow a bit to contain review branches (or something comparable). If you'd like to chat a bit about potential solutions for your approach just drop me a line!
deng 10y ago
This looks impressive, especially how they seem to handle rebases/squashes with force push, which is a problem that pretty much all other repo managers simply ignore (except for Gerrit, but that one has other problems...).
- ithkuil 10y ago
  reviewable.io handles that very well too (but it's a hosted service)
  - yeraydarias 10y ago
    Yay, thanks, looks amazing. Being hosted is not always a bad thing, thinking in the cost of maintenance it can deserve the price.
- biehl 10y ago
  Yes, that is the first thing I look for too! reviewable.io, is the only other I know of that handles this.
- lima 10y ago
  Phabricator handles it well thanks to its Arcanist CLI tool.
  - deng 10y ago
    As I understand it, Phabricator largely avoids the problem because it is primarily patch-based and not branch-based? How would arcanist handle a force-pushed branch without simply starting a new review process?
    - lima 10y ago
      Exactly, it sidesteps the problem by decoupling branches and code review. A review request is just like a diff in a mailbox. It'd just update the diff. It's really close to the Linux kernel development model and it scales very well.
abhishivsaxena 10y ago
check sourcegraph
mirages 10y ago
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT : HN hug of death ?
- yeraydarias 10y ago
  It works fine now, I believe it could be a redeployment or similar.
  - robinshen 10y ago
    Looks like many GitPlex downloads are going on... And this happens since two hours ago when I posted this news. The first time I've experienced with HN death hug, 8) Another thing in my agenda now (to optimize the web site and download).
    - yeraydarias 10y ago
      hehehe, good luck ... you never know what will happen until the traffic came :-)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - muse900 10y ago
    it doesnt for me atm
Gmo 10y ago
Looks interesting, is there any precise roadmap ? (could not find one). Would be particularly interested by C# support, and with the tooling that Microsoft lately, I think it would be a perfect fit !
- robinshen 10y ago
  The next step is to support major languages, and C# is definitely on our road map.
sleepychu 10y ago
The all caps 'titles' which are really short descriptions of the features make the page hard to read. Features look good though and the interface is nice.
sandGorgon 10y ago
Looks like a Java webapp running on top of jetty [1]. Interesting - that's a quick and easy deployment. I wonder what are the hosting requirements and performance implications. [1] https://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fgitplex.pmease.com%2fdemo%2fandroid-framework-base%2fcommits https://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fgitplex.pmease.com%2fdem...
- robinshen 10y ago
  Yes that is true. We build this tool with easy deployment in mind. And we've devoted a lot of our effort to performance. Just check the linux repository for instance (http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/linux http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/linux), GitPlex is able to calculate latest commits of many sub folders quickly, compared to decades needed by other tools, :) If your repository is not as large as linux, a 1 cpu machine with 1G memory allocated to GitPlex will be more than enough.
partycoder 10y ago
Well, in a sense, this departs from github in the sense that they try to keep everything as simple as possible (sort like the Apple design philosophy). But developers are, or should be, power users. And in that regard a tool like this is VERY welcome. A tool that exposes some more sharp edges in exchange for flexibility.
- robinshen 10y ago
  We also try to keep things simple. Without gatekeepers, the pull request workflow is quite the same as GitHub. Advanced users can explore gatekeepers to achieve much flexible workflows. Hackers may also write plugins to add their own gatekeepers in future releases. 8)
smegel 10y ago
Looks like it is trying to be an IDE.
wyclif 10y ago
We created GitPlex to manage our own code as result of not satisfying with existing tools on the market "...not satisfying"? I think what you want to write here is something like this: "We created GitPlex to manage our own code as a result of dissatisfaction with existing tools on the market" or even better, a sentence shorter than that.
- robinshen 10y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. Will get that fixed. Not a human language expert, but hope I can do better in computer languages, :)
sashaafm 10y ago
Could you please show us an example of "Preview pull request integration result and build status"? Thanks
- robinshen 10y ago
  Missed description of the integration preview part, now get it added: https://www.pmease.com/gitplex#preview-integration https://www.pmease.com/gitplex#preview-integration
skrebbel 10y ago
Folks, this is why you want to do code reviews inside your editors / IDEs. I like this project, but really what they did is build a read-only version of an IDE from the ground up. You already have one and you know it inside out. I've found, as the OP did, that the GitHub/Lab/Bucket code review UIs strongly encourage nitpicking over code style and strongly discourage true insightful reviews on a design and architecture level. This happens simply because of the amount of effort your have to do to see and feel the wider impact of a pull request on your codebase. It's like looking at code with blinders on. So what you want to do is checkout the pull request and use your editor. We made this a habit here at TalkJS and the quality, speed and usefulness of our code reviews skyrocketed. Actually we take it one step further: we dropped the commenting interface altogether. Our code reviews are commits, with code comments by a particular format: // REVIEW(marcin<-egbert): Won't the event listener get re-registered every time this function is called? My colleague Marcin can find all reviews intended for him by grepping for `REVIEW(marcin`. Git ensures that even across merges and code changes, comments stay put, and once Marcin applies the review comment he removes the comment. He can reply by adding a comment in the same format. The fact that review comments are right there in the git history also really helps track down complicated problems. Finally, we get the freedom of merging a PR anyway even though some things ought to be better, without losing track of the review comment. Obviously that's a code smell, but sometimes it's better to release first and refactor next day. But even if you think this is insane and reviews don't belong in the code, I'd like to warmly encourage you to use your editor for reviews.
- robinshen 10y ago
  Thanks for the ideas. While I agree with you that desktop IDE is a good place for design and architecture level reviews, having a lightweight web "IDE" will be beneficial as it does not require you to switch your local workspace to particular revisions for review. Also I often find myself need to copy code from some old revisions, in that case, I just visit our web "IDE", find desired revisions with revision search helper, and open desired symbols to copy relevant code out.
  - 91bananas 10y ago
    A really good editor will allow you to do this without leaving. Pycharm/jetbrains handle this the best I have ever seen. Atom is almost there with a couple of the packages I have found
kinofcain 10y ago
Very impressive. This has some features we've been missing in bitbucket/gitlab/github and it looks like the UI is well thought out and still simple. The IDE-like source parsing is interesting, and I disagree with some of the other commenters here that that should only exist in an IDE, but the java limitation makes that just a novelty for us. Particularly though the gerrit-style workflow and the rules engine for permissions is enticing. We'd love to move to something like gerrit but don't want to give up the friendliness of bitbucket/github. Nice job.
- robinshen 10y ago
  We are a Java shop and created the tool to manage our own code initially. Our next priority is to make it supporting more languages.
  - kinofcain 10y ago
    Yeah, figured as much. Look forward to that.
shawabawa3 10y ago
If anyone wants to try it out quickly I made a docker image for it docker run -p 6610:6610 frankh/gitplex
- robinshen 10y ago
  This is convenient. Thanks for the effort!
irfansharif 10y ago
i've personally found using Reviewable[0] to be a delight, automatically plugs in your github workflow in that it modifies the comments in your original PR with comments left on reviewable itself. one killer feature is their batch comment mode, the ability to draft up a whole set of comments and publish in one go all the while tracking the resolution/conversation of each point brought up. an example of this is here[1], batched comments with the multiple threads of discussions across various revisions and tracked to resolution. [0]: https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io [1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/10618 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/10618
- regularjack 10y ago
  You can batch comments in GitHub.com too. This feature has been available for a few months now https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-reviews/ https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-reviews/
LeanderK 10y ago
how do you parse the java-code? In front- or backend? If frontend what libraries do you use or did you create everything from scratch?
- robinshen 10y ago
  We do that in backend with a hand written, simple parser just to pick up information we needed. And it is fast (can index all JDK8 source symbols in seconds).
  - LeanderK 10y ago
    i am currently working on a side project [1] to search for java-method usages and also parse java-code on the backend, but it's not as fast as i would like it to be. I did some very obvious performance improvement, but i suspect that for the most time i am waiting to download the sources/to complete the search request. There might also be some serious performance issues (it started as a hackathon project, so...). I hope to find time this weekend to do some benchmarking. I would guess you download the whole git repo at once and then do the parsing and not lazily per file? I also experience high memory usage, it might be the library that i am using. [1] https://exemplator.xyz https://exemplator.xyz
guomanmin 10y ago
Participate in Atlassian Research My name is Angela and I do research for Bitbucket. I’m kicking off a round of discussions with people who use Git tools. Ideally, I’d like to talk to people that sit on a team of 3 or more. If this is you, I would love to talk to you about your experience with <using> Git tools, or just some of the pain points that are keeping you up at night when doing your jobs.   We’ll just need 30 mins of your time, and as a token of my thanks to those that participate, I’d like to offer a US$50 Amazon gift voucher.    If you’re interested, just shoot me an email with your availability over the next few weeks and we can set up a time to chat for 30 minutes. Please also include your timezone so we can schedule a suitable time (as I’m located in San Francisco). Hope to talk to you soon!    Cheers,  Angela Guo aguo@atlassian.com
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
guomanmin 10y ago
Participate in Atlassian Research My name is Angela and I do research for Bitbucket. I’m kicking off a round of discussions with people who use Git tools. Ideally, I’d like to talk to people that sit on a team of 3 or more. If this is you, I would love to talk to you about your experience with <using> Git tools, or just some of the pain points that are keeping you up at night when doing your jobs.   We’ll just need 30 mins of your time, and as a token of my thanks to those that participate, I’d like to offer a US$50 Amazon gift voucher.    If you’re interested, just shoot me an email with your availability over the next few weeks and we can set up a time to chat for 30 minutes. Please also include your timezone so we can schedule a suitable time (as I’m located in San Francisco). Hope to talk to you soon! Cheers,   Angela Guo aguo@atlassian.com
- dang 10y ago
  You posted 10 of these comments and provoked users into emailing us to complain about spam. Those users are right, because HN isn't the place for this kind of thing, and certainly not repeatedly in multiple threads. We haven't banned your account because I'm sure you were acting in good faith, but please stop.

193 points by robinshen 10y ago

I don't care much about code review, but it's a close enough attractor to the space of code reading that it seems to be draining attention. So let me hijack this topic and post a request for product (I'd write it myself, but priorities... adult life sucks hard). -- I dream of a tool that facilitates code reading and exploration. It has some similar features with code review tools, namely: - integration with version control systems - basic semantic search/navigation - looks clean - not meant to be for writing code But my dream tool also has following features I haven't seen implemented in any code review tool (or anywhere): - annotations - not just "comments", but the ability to tag lines, to strike them out, highlight, color, scribble on them, etc. - basically anything you'd do with a printout of a code - easy way to review history of a single file (with annotations) - ability to easily bookmark areas / pieces of code and use those bookmarks in comments / annotations - ability for viewing structural diagrams of the codebase - full blown semantic search - who calls, calls who, etc. - project-structure-oriented, not repository-history/commit-oriented Basically, I'd love a tool not for collaboration, but for individual work - a tool that would facilitate exploring and familiarizing yourself with big codebases, as well as empower one when the time comes to do bigger refactorings. Would be doubly useful if I could use it on a tablet, so that I could get up from in front of my computer to go and think about the changes I'm about to make (right now, I end up actually printing code if I have to refactor something very messy).

sarnowski 10y ago
Sounds like you described https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ (I am not affiliated with Jetbrains in any way)
- theptip 10y ago
  I've seen a couple brief comments about Upsource in this thread. Can anyone give a deeper dive on their experiences? I tried it very briefly but didn't have time to configure integration with my IDE, just played in the web browser. I suspect that means I didn't try the best feature. Pros/cons of this tool?
  - leonya2 10y ago
    Upsource team member here. Since Upsource indexes your code just like any JetBrains IDE does, it gives you code navigation, inspections, etc. in the browser, which means its "best features" don't require using it as an IDE plugin. Pros: I'm obviously biased so I won't go into those. Cons: it's not a lightweight tool that's happy with 1 gig of memory. Configuring and waiting for code indexes takes a bit of time, especially if you're trying it out on large legacy codebases. It also won't manage a Git repository for you.
robinshen 10y ago
I think GitPlex meets most of the requirement here if you are writing Java code (and more languages are being added). Unlike other tooks, it does not place any requirements on project build system (Maven, Gradle, etc) and can work on any project containing supported languages. Checkout android code base for instance: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?revision=master&path=core/java/android/inputmethodservice/Keyboard.java&mark=61.13-61.21 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?... I actually created this tool to suffice my own needs when browsing history of QuickBuild source code.
taspeotis 10y ago
I get the feeling that Microsoft has a lot of these things, but they're disparate. e.g. code navigation [1], search [2] and CodeLens [3]. [1] https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/string.cs,206408f6325aea24 https://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/strin... [2] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/search/code/advanced-search#codefunctions https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/search/code/advanced... [3] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn269218.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn269218.aspx
qznc 10y ago
> annotations - not just "comments" What kind of annotations would not make sense as comments?
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Discussions about the code perhaps.
- Juliate 10y ago
  Annotations as what you scribble in the margin of an article or on a page in a book. Comments are inline with the code. Annotations are aside, and serve both as visual anchors and as "aside" notes.
  - robinshen 10y ago
    Is it something like this? http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?revision=master&path=core/java/android/inputmethodservice/Keyboard.java&mark=138.4-146.48&comment=2 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/files?... You may also put annotations on any diffs: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit?revision=72d6dca09e85627b47c94f9a6ebf37ea56291450&comment=3&mark=72d6dca09e85627b47c94f9a6ebf37ea56291450:wifi/java/android/net/wifi/p2p/WifiP2pManager.java:286.4-289.7 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit...
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I'm thinking in terms of what I'd do if the code was printed out on paper. http://imgur.com/KMCBMjA http://imgur.com/KMCBMjA
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    The trouble with that is, how on earth do you get the annotations to apply across revisions? Or would you be OK with them only applying to a given revision and then ... what, disappearing? Or going into a 'floating bucket' of annotations for the entire file?
_pmf_ 10y ago
> Would be doubly useful if I could use it on a tablet That's something that baffles me: the complete lack of a comfortable (or at least not painful) way to read and annotate source code on Android.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Indeed. The closest I came to what I need was a proof-of-concept I did - printing source code to PDF and using Adobe Reader's annotation tools. Wasn't exactly convenient without a good ability to switch between multiple source files, but could be made to work. I'd love to have such browsing/annotation tool I could take with me to a park, to browse code and think about it while on a walk, without continuous distractions of the office / Internet connection.
oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
Right now, I would take a button to go to the previous revision of a file, showing the full file with the diff underneath. That way I could very easily 'browse' through the history of a file to find out things like when a particular change got introduced or just get a feel for its history. Why on earth don't github/bitbucket provide this? Surely it's a reasonable and common requirement? Or is there something inherent to git that makes it too awkward?
- pricechild 10y ago
  Are you looking for something akin to `git blame`? Github & Bitbucket both provide a gui for this. Something even closer to what you're asking for... in github hit the 'history' button on a file (next to blame) and you'll get the commits which affected it. Hit the 7 character commit-id and you'll be taken to the diff of that change, jumped specifically to the file in question.
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    I never really use `git blame` - my primary git use case is as a single user. The history button in github is close to what I'd like, but it's not quite as friendly as single next/previous buttons that just paginate the changes to a file. That makes cycling through the history very easy, whilst 'click commit id, back, remember which commit we just viewed, click following commit id, repeate' all sounds a bit painful.
- robinshen 10y ago
  GitPlex can show history of any path (a file or directory) quickly via history button, and from there you can even refine the history (search for certain tags, commits made by certain people, etc) of the file, and once you get to the point, you can either view content of the file, or hit the compare button to compare with your previous browsed copy. An example here: http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commits?compareWith=836e74052e16f4c24c3e7e9eab0dbcaee462986f&query=path%28core/java/android/view/View.java%29 http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/android-framework-base/commit...
- sdesol 10y ago
pjmlp 10y ago
You mean an IDE?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  After a fashion. A reading/exploration-oriented lightweight IDE. No IDE that I know of support scribbling over code, for example. Also, for the mode of work I'm thinking about, having no ability to actually write code would be a feature.
  - 91bananas 10y ago
    Truly you've described this: https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/
sqs 10y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. We 100% agree, and that's why we built Sourcegraph. Check out our roadmap at https://sourcegraph.com/plan https://sourcegraph.com/plan. And try browsing code on Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/client.go#L94 https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... (we support other languages as well). Right-click on "parseURL" and choose "Find All References". If you click on "HasPrefix" a few lines below, you'll see a cross-repo jump (and the right-click menu lets you see global/cross-repo references). Sign up at https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com to get it on your own GitHub repos.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Very interesting demo. So it has at least one feature I'm looking for :). Basically, I'd like something like that, but with annotations like in Acrobat Reader (but more), on a tablet, and off-line at least for my own codebase. I found a small issue with "peek definition" window: http://imgur.com/TT2KmpR http://imgur.com/TT2KmpR.
  - sqs 10y ago
    Shoot me an email at sqs@sourcegraph.com if you want to get early access to some of the upcoming things (or sign up at https://sourcegraph.com/beta https://sourcegraph.com/beta). I think you'll like what's coming. Thanks for the bug report. :)
- emirozer 10y ago
  This is very impressive, well done!
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I recommend you watch this: https://youtu.be/dSqLt8BgbRQ https://youtu.be/dSqLt8BgbRQ
- robinshen 10y ago
  Thanks for the link, bookmarked it for studying, :)
dugmartin 10y ago
I'm building something like that now but instead of annotations in the code it captures your browse through the codebase as a tree that you can then annotate, save and share. It is going to run both in the browser to explore code hosted on GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, etc and locally as an Electron app. Very vague landing page with signup here: http://www.browsethesource.com/ http://www.browsethesource.com/
Dangeranger 10y ago
For quick browsing of a files commits I use Emacs with Magit and utilize the time travel feature of Git-Timemachine https://github.com/pidu/git-timemachine https://github.com/pidu/git-timemachine You don't get the annotations you want, but you could make a comment with a common starting word like NOTE: then remove them before you merge the refactorings.
hkailahi 10y ago
Yes! This is this tool I've been dreaming of too! I would pay a lot of money for something like this.
seanpackham 10y ago
That is a great list of features! I will create feature requests for them in GitLab (I work at GitLab). I'm curious what you think of the single file history in current systems, are they OK but just missing annotations?

grault 10y ago

I'd be in favor of having some standard "code review markup language", which could contain review comments and workflows. Then you would be able to put these in files and make those files part of your repository (ie commit/push). Then, you could build various frontends to handle these in a user friendly way if you like. But also, would be accessible and editable in your favorite text editor.

blowski 10y ago
As long as the tools and processes don't get in the way of communication because they require comments to be written in a particular format or in a precise place. Too often, such tools end up in discouraging the very thing they're supposed to help.
robinshen 10y ago
We solve this via gatekeeper rules (repository administrator defines rules such as who needs to review which part of code, or whose code needs to be reviewed (intern team for instance needs to be reviewed by core team etc), or what commit message rule should be followed etc. A typical review process suggested by GitPlex can be found here: http://wiki.pmease.com/display/GP10/Iterative+Review+with+Pull+Request http://wiki.pmease.com/display/GP10/Iterative+Review+with+Pu...
derwildemomo 10y ago
This is something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately – I considered extending our git-flow a bit to contain review branches (or something comparable). If you'd like to chat a bit about potential solutions for your approach just drop me a line!

deng 10y ago

This looks impressive, especially how they seem to handle rebases/squashes with force push, which is a problem that pretty much all other repo managers simply ignore (except for Gerrit, but that one has other problems...).

ithkuil 10y ago
reviewable.io handles that very well too (but it's a hosted service)
- yeraydarias 10y ago
  Yay, thanks, looks amazing. Being hosted is not always a bad thing, thinking in the cost of maintenance it can deserve the price.
biehl 10y ago
Yes, that is the first thing I look for too! reviewable.io, is the only other I know of that handles this.
lima 10y ago
Phabricator handles it well thanks to its Arcanist CLI tool.
- deng 10y ago
  As I understand it, Phabricator largely avoids the problem because it is primarily patch-based and not branch-based? How would arcanist handle a force-pushed branch without simply starting a new review process?
  - lima 10y ago
    Exactly, it sidesteps the problem by decoupling branches and code review. A review request is just like a diff in a mailbox. It'd just update the diff. It's really close to the Linux kernel development model and it scales very well.

abhishivsaxena 10y ago

check sourcegraph

mirages 10y ago

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT : HN hug of death ?

yeraydarias 10y ago
It works fine now, I believe it could be a redeployment or similar.
- robinshen 10y ago
  Looks like many GitPlex downloads are going on... And this happens since two hours ago when I posted this news. The first time I've experienced with HN death hug, 8) Another thing in my agenda now (to optimize the web site and download).
  - yeraydarias 10y ago
    hehehe, good luck ... you never know what will happen until the traffic came :-)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- muse900 10y ago
  it doesnt for me atm

Gmo 10y ago

Looks interesting, is there any precise roadmap ? (could not find one). Would be particularly interested by C# support, and with the tooling that Microsoft lately, I think it would be a perfect fit !

robinshen 10y ago
The next step is to support major languages, and C# is definitely on our road map.

sleepychu 10y ago

The all caps 'titles' which are really short descriptions of the features make the page hard to read. Features look good though and the interface is nice.

sandGorgon 10y ago

Looks like a Java webapp running on top of jetty [1]. Interesting - that's a quick and easy deployment. I wonder what are the hosting requirements and performance implications. [1] https://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fgitplex.pmease.com%2fdemo%2fandroid-framework-base%2fcommits https://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fgitplex.pmease.com%2fdem...

robinshen 10y ago
Yes that is true. We build this tool with easy deployment in mind. And we've devoted a lot of our effort to performance. Just check the linux repository for instance (http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/linux http://gitplex.pmease.com/demo/linux), GitPlex is able to calculate latest commits of many sub folders quickly, compared to decades needed by other tools, :) If your repository is not as large as linux, a 1 cpu machine with 1G memory allocated to GitPlex will be more than enough.

partycoder 10y ago

Well, in a sense, this departs from github in the sense that they try to keep everything as simple as possible (sort like the Apple design philosophy). But developers are, or should be, power users. And in that regard a tool like this is VERY welcome. A tool that exposes some more sharp edges in exchange for flexibility.

robinshen 10y ago
We also try to keep things simple. Without gatekeepers, the pull request workflow is quite the same as GitHub. Advanced users can explore gatekeepers to achieve much flexible workflows. Hackers may also write plugins to add their own gatekeepers in future releases. 8)

smegel 10y ago

Looks like it is trying to be an IDE.

wyclif 10y ago

We created GitPlex to manage our own code as result of not satisfying with existing tools on the market "...not satisfying"? I think what you want to write here is something like this: "We created GitPlex to manage our own code as a result of dissatisfaction with existing tools on the market" or even better, a sentence shorter than that.

robinshen 10y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. Will get that fixed. Not a human language expert, but hope I can do better in computer languages, :)

sashaafm 10y ago

Could you please show us an example of "Preview pull request integration result and build status"? Thanks

robinshen 10y ago
Missed description of the integration preview part, now get it added: https://www.pmease.com/gitplex#preview-integration https://www.pmease.com/gitplex#preview-integration

skrebbel 10y ago

Folks, this is why you want to do code reviews inside your editors / IDEs. I like this project, but really what they did is build a read-only version of an IDE from the ground up. You already have one and you know it inside out. I've found, as the OP did, that the GitHub/Lab/Bucket code review UIs strongly encourage nitpicking over code style and strongly discourage true insightful reviews on a design and architecture level. This happens simply because of the amount of effort your have to do to see and feel the wider impact of a pull request on your codebase. It's like looking at code with blinders on. So what you want to do is checkout the pull request and use your editor. We made this a habit here at TalkJS and the quality, speed and usefulness of our code reviews skyrocketed. Actually we take it one step further: we dropped the commenting interface altogether. Our code reviews are commits, with code comments by a particular format: // REVIEW(marcin<-egbert): Won't the event listener get re-registered every time this function is called? My colleague Marcin can find all reviews intended for him by grepping for `REVIEW(marcin`. Git ensures that even across merges and code changes, comments stay put, and once Marcin applies the review comment he removes the comment. He can reply by adding a comment in the same format. The fact that review comments are right there in the git history also really helps track down complicated problems. Finally, we get the freedom of merging a PR anyway even though some things ought to be better, without losing track of the review comment. Obviously that's a code smell, but sometimes it's better to release first and refactor next day. But even if you think this is insane and reviews don't belong in the code, I'd like to warmly encourage you to use your editor for reviews.

robinshen 10y ago
Thanks for the ideas. While I agree with you that desktop IDE is a good place for design and architecture level reviews, having a lightweight web "IDE" will be beneficial as it does not require you to switch your local workspace to particular revisions for review. Also I often find myself need to copy code from some old revisions, in that case, I just visit our web "IDE", find desired revisions with revision search helper, and open desired symbols to copy relevant code out.
- 91bananas 10y ago
  A really good editor will allow you to do this without leaving. Pycharm/jetbrains handle this the best I have ever seen. Atom is almost there with a couple of the packages I have found

kinofcain 10y ago

Very impressive. This has some features we've been missing in bitbucket/gitlab/github and it looks like the UI is well thought out and still simple. The IDE-like source parsing is interesting, and I disagree with some of the other commenters here that that should only exist in an IDE, but the java limitation makes that just a novelty for us. Particularly though the gerrit-style workflow and the rules engine for permissions is enticing. We'd love to move to something like gerrit but don't want to give up the friendliness of bitbucket/github. Nice job.

robinshen 10y ago
We are a Java shop and created the tool to manage our own code initially. Our next priority is to make it supporting more languages.
- kinofcain 10y ago
  Yeah, figured as much. Look forward to that.

shawabawa3 10y ago

If anyone wants to try it out quickly I made a docker image for it docker run -p 6610:6610 frankh/gitplex

robinshen 10y ago
This is convenient. Thanks for the effort!

irfansharif 10y ago

i've personally found using Reviewable[0] to be a delight, automatically plugs in your github workflow in that it modifies the comments in your original PR with comments left on reviewable itself. one killer feature is their batch comment mode, the ability to draft up a whole set of comments and publish in one go all the while tracking the resolution/conversation of each point brought up. an example of this is here[1], batched comments with the multiple threads of discussions across various revisions and tracked to resolution. [0]: https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io [1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/10618 https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/10618

regularjack 10y ago
You can batch comments in GitHub.com too. This feature has been available for a few months now https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-reviews/ https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-reviews/

LeanderK 10y ago

how do you parse the java-code? In front- or backend? If frontend what libraries do you use or did you create everything from scratch?

robinshen 10y ago
We do that in backend with a hand written, simple parser just to pick up information we needed. And it is fast (can index all JDK8 source symbols in seconds).
- LeanderK 10y ago
  i am currently working on a side project [1] to search for java-method usages and also parse java-code on the backend, but it's not as fast as i would like it to be. I did some very obvious performance improvement, but i suspect that for the most time i am waiting to download the sources/to complete the search request. There might also be some serious performance issues (it started as a hackathon project, so...). I hope to find time this weekend to do some benchmarking. I would guess you download the whole git repo at once and then do the parsing and not lazily per file? I also experience high memory usage, it might be the library that i am using. [1] https://exemplator.xyz https://exemplator.xyz

guomanmin 10y ago

Participate in Atlassian Research My name is Angela and I do research for Bitbucket. I’m kicking off a round of discussions with people who use Git tools. Ideally, I’d like to talk to people that sit on a team of 3 or more. If this is you, I would love to talk to you about your experience with <using> Git tools, or just some of the pain points that are keeping you up at night when doing your jobs.   We’ll just need 30 mins of your time, and as a token of my thanks to those that participate, I’d like to offer a US$50 Amazon gift voucher.    If you’re interested, just shoot me an email with your availability over the next few weeks and we can set up a time to chat for 30 minutes. Please also include your timezone so we can schedule a suitable time (as I’m located in San Francisco). Hope to talk to you soon!    Cheers,  Angela Guo aguo@atlassian.com

deleted 10y ago

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guomanmin 10y ago

dang 10y ago
You posted 10 of these comments and provoked users into emailing us to complain about spam. Those users are right, because HN isn't the place for this kind of thing, and certainly not repeatedly in multiple threads. We haven't banned your account because I'm sure you were acting in good faith, but please stop.