Gerrit update - diff in comment notification emails

[Simon Marchi]

On 2019-11-08 12:16 p.m., Simon Marchi wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> In the last few days, I have tackled the problem of making the Gerrit
> comment notification emails show comments in a diff context.
> 
> Previously, we would show some context, but that context would only
> include lines from the version of the file that was commented on.  This
> means that if the commenter had put a comment on the left pane in the
> web UI, the comment would be placed in a context containing lines from
> the "before" version of the file.  If the commenter had put a comment on
> the right pane, the context would show lines from the "after" version of
> the file.
> 
> This was already an improvement compared to Gerrit's normal behavior of
> showing just one line of context (or the multiple lines of the range,
> if the comment was placed on a range), but it still was lacking the
> information to understand what was actually changed.
> 
> The new format shows a portion of the diff around each comment,
> resulting in something like this:
> 
>   https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2019-11/msg00239.html
> 
> I made the output look as much as possible like "git diff" output to
> make people feel at home, but we are not limited to that.  I hope that
> this is a welcome change.  If you have some ideas on how to improve it
> further, I would be happy to hear your suggestions.  I am sure we will
> hit some corner cases for which the script doesn't give a good output,
> so please report any problem you see.
> 
> This is all implemented using a Python script [1] that uses Gerrit's
> REST API, so the idea is that if you'd like to propose something, you
> can actually try it out yourself and propose a code change.  You can run
> the script on any batch of already published comments to see what the
> result would be.
> 
> If the generated email doesn't contain any of the comments on the code,
> such as this:
> 
>   https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2019-11/msg00238.html
> 
> it's probably because the script failed.  It's then possible to just
> run it locally, point it to the change, and see what happens.
> 
> Note that while this shows the comments in the context of the diffs, it
> doesn't show the comment you are replying to, if you were commenting in
> reply to another comment.  So if we just reply "Done" in the web UI, we
> will only see "Done" in the notification email, which is not very
> enlightening.  So please try to use "Quote" instead of "Reply" and quote
> the relevant portion of what you are replying to (just like you would by
> email), so that it appears in the notification email.
> 
> Simon
> 
> [1] https://gnutoolchain-gerrit.osci.io/r/gitweb?p=gerrit.git;a=blob;f=resources/com/google/gerrit/pgm/init/generate-comment-diff.py;hb=refs/heads/stable-3.0-gnu

I was told that this link was not accessible.  It was a permission problem
with Gitweb, it should be fixed now.

Sorry for the trouble.

Simon