wiki:RevtreePlugin

Version 15 (modified by Emmanuel Blot, 17 years ago) (diff)

Update w/ the latest plugin release (0.5.0)

Revision Graph for the Version Control Browser

Description

This plugin renders a graphical representation of the repository.

The plugin collects the repository's revisions and rebuilds the branches based the names of the files changed in each revision.

Filters can be used to chose which branches and which revisions are to be displayed.

Each depicted changeset is a clickable item that redirects the browser to the appropriate changeset view.

Whenever the mouse cursor is hovered over a revtree changeset, the browser opens a tool tip box that shows the revision number, the author and the date of the revision along with the wiki-formatted log message.

The plugin also shows branch cloning/tagging operations, and can be extended to render other kinds of operations such as merging.

Changeset info tip
Changeset info tip

Overview

This plugin creates a graph that show the changesets of the project repository.

Filters

The user may select which changesets are to be rendered, based on the several filters:

  • The main filters are mutually exclusive:
    1. changeset range: this filter selects a range of changesets to be rendered
    2. time range: this filters selects the latest changesets of the repository, with the following predefined time ranges:
      • day, 2 days, 3 days, week, fortnight, month, 2 months, 3 months, year
  • Any of the following filters can be combined to the main filter to refine the selection:
    • branch name: this filter selects a single branch, along with all branches declared as 'trunks'
    • author: this filter selects all the branches for which the selected author has be a participant (i.e. has committed at least one changeset)
    • show terminated branches: this filter makes all branches visible, included deleted ones. Default setting hides all terminated branches.

User preferences (filters)
User preferences (filters)

Two kinds of views can be selected:

  • compact: in this mode, the revtree graph is kept as compact as possible, as an attempt to make all the changeset visible in the web browser page and thereby minimize the scrolling actions. Changesets are placed along on their branche, irrespectively of the nearby branches.
  • timeline: in this mode, the revtree graph maintains a time view of the repository: each changeset can be seen relatively to the other changesets, whichever the changeset branch.

Example

(empty image, attachment deletion is not allowed)

User preference persistence

The plugin stores the user settings (filters) in the user session, so the latest configuration is used whenever the user selects the 'revtree' page.

In some cases, the chosen filters select no changeset hence no revtree graph cannot be rendered. In such an event, a Trac error is displayed with the following message:

Selected filters cannot render a revision tree

User settings are not saved if the filter does not permit to generate a valid revtree graph.

Limitations

There are a lot of limitations, so read them carefully.

  1. the RevtreePlugin generates inlined SVG.
    • SVG is only supported on modern browsers
    • inlined SVG means that the plugin generates XHTML+SVG data, which are only supported by few browsers. Many browsers that support SVG do not accept inlined SVG. Checkout the following section for a non-exhaustive list of supported browsers.
  2. the RevtreePlugin only works with SVN repositories
  3. it does not support SVN authz
  4. it has not been thought with multiple projects per repository in mind, so its support for this kind of configuration is probably weak
  5. filters do not support multiple selections: one can only select all or one branch, all or one author

See RevtreePlugin/Limitations for a technical 'discussion' about the current limitations.

The plugin output has been tested against the w3 validator and generates Valid XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1.

Supported browsers

Any browser that supports inlined SVG should work. However, as it seems that some browsers are not able to cope with this kind of data, the following table sums up what you can expect from your favorite browser:

OS Browser Version Support Comments / Issues
Windows Firefox 1.5, 2.0 Ok Gecko/1.8.1
3.0a1 Ok Infotips are not shown anymore (since 0.5.0)
IE + Adobe 7.0 + 3.03 No Does not even understand the XHTML+XML MIME type
Opera 9.02 Ok  
OS X Camino 1.0.3 Buggy Changeset text is not shown (blind changesets)
Firefox 1.5, 2.0 Buggy Issues with fonts (known browser issue w/ SVG)
3.0a1 Partial Infotips are not shown anymore (since 0.5.0)
OmniWeb 5.5.1 Weak Changeset text sometimes disappears and info tips are not shown
Opera 9.02 Ok  
Safari 2.0.4 No Does not support SVG (needs Safari 3.x)
Webkit r19312 Ok  
Linux Epiphany 2.14.3 Ok Gnome Web Browser Gecko/1.8
Firefox 2.0 Ok Iceweasel/2.0 Gecko/1.8.1
3.0a1 Partial Infotips are not shown anymore (since 0.5.0)
Konqueror 3.5.5 No The revision tree is not shown (inlined SVG does not seem to be supported)
Opera 9.10 Ok Build 521 (Qt 3.3.7)

The browser compatibility matrix has been tested against RevtreePlugin 0.5.0

Installation

Get the plugin source code

Download

Download the zipped source from [download:revtreeplugin here].

Source

You can check out RevtreePlugin from here using Subversion, or browse the source with Trac.

Build the plugin

As with any other plugin:

python setup.py bdist_egg

Installation of the plugin

Copy the generated egg file (from the dist/ directory) to your project plugin directory, or in the global plugin directory if you want to use it for several Trac projects

Enabling the plugin

From the WebAdmin plugin interface or from your trac.ini file, enable the RevtreePlugin.

In trac.ini, edit the components section to add the revtree entry as follows:

[components]
revtree.* = enabled

Configuration

Revtree plugin can be configured with the help of the following settings:

  • Mandatory parameters defined in the Trac section
    [trac]
    # SVN repositories only
    repository_type = svn
    # Base URL is a required parameter: it should be defined
    base_url =
    
    Note: base_url should not be left blank: it should be defined to the actual Trac URL, see TracIni
  • Optional parameters defined in the revtree section
    [revtree]
    # regular expression for branch recognition 
    # (always define 2 named groups: 'branch' and 'path')
    branch_re = ^(?P<branch>branches/[^/]+|trunk|data)(?:/(?P<path>.*))?$
    # space-separated list of branches that should be considered as 'trunks'
    trunks = trunk
    # SVG rendering scale (real number)
    scale = 1.0
    # oldest revision to consider (default to the latest revision in the repos)
    revbase = 1
    # whether time filters are related to the youngest revision or 
    # based on absolute time
    reltime = True
    # default appearance (either 'compact' or 'timeline')
    style = compact
    

Some settings deserve additional information:

  • the style option defines the default revtree graph style. Each user overwrites the default style the first time he updates the revtree style.
  • the reltime option cannot be customized by the users. The admin choses whether the time filters are based on the absolute time or the youngest changeset in the repository. Let's say the youngest revision in the repository has been committed three days ago:
    1. if reltime is set, the revtree time starts three days ago as well: if the user selects the last 2 days as a filter, the last 5 days (3+2) would be shown
    2. if reltime is not set, the revtree time starts now: if the user selects the last 2 days, no changeset would be shown.

Revtree menu item

You can change the position of the revtree menu item using the Trac mainnav setting, see TracIni.

For example, to make the revtree menu item appear at the right hand side of the browser item, update the mainnav line as follows:

[trac]
mainnav = wiki,timeline,roadmap,browser,revtree,tickets,newticket,search

Permissions

The RevtreePlugin defines a new permission REVTREE_VIEW. This permission should be defined for the 'revtree' link to appear in the main navigation bar, and to give access to the revtree feature.

Restarting trac

You need to restart your web server to make the changes effective.

Revision tree enhancements

The RevtreePlugin has been written with customization in mind: it provides extension points so that one can write his own plugin(s) to add information to the rendered graph and enhance it.

For now, there are two ways to enhance the revision tree graph:

  • Change the appearance of the rendered items, and add operations to the graph. An operation is a relation between two distinct branches, such as a merge operation.
    -> this extension point is dedicated to provide operations that are not maintained by the underlying repository. These operations can be stored in revision properties, log message, or any other way: it depends on how a team use the repository.
  • Improve the branch placement. One of the most difficult task to draw a graphical representation of the repository is to find the best location for each branch. The best location depends on how a team work, what is the most important information to be represented, and to limit the number of operation intersections as much as possible.
    -> this extension point allows to provide a custom branch sorting. There are probably great algorithms that would allow to find the best branch placement.

Default enhancers

The RevtreePlugin comes with default enhancers:

  • SimpleEnhancer is a very basic enhancer that is only able to cope with branch creation and tagging.
  • It uses a dummy placement algorithm, which places the trunk at the center of the graph, and tries to reduce the number of operation intersections.

More enhancers

The RevtreePlugin/LogEnhancer plugin is provided as an implementation example of the first kind of enhancer.

(More technical doc to come about how to write your own enhancers)

Miscelleanous

Recent Changes

See RevtreePlugin/Changelog

Since version 0.5.0, only Trac 0.11 is supported.
Previous releases are still available for download, but are not maintained.

Version 0.5.0 and above cannot be used with Trac 0.10 as it requires the Genshi library and use Trac internal APIs that have changed since the previous release.

Additional notes

Note that several API breaks are expected in Trac 0.11, which may occasionally break this plugin. Be sure to upgrade your Trac trunk to the latest available release before reporting an incident issue w/ this plugin.

Do not forget to flush your browser cache when you update the RevtreePlugin. Several browsers fail to reload CSS and/or Javascript files properly, which may appear as plugin errors.

What about the original revtree plugin?

It supersedes the SvnCcHelpersScript/RevTree plugin:

  1. it does not rely on any Clearcase external scripts nor on any SVN custom properties to build the graph,
  2. it does not use the GraphvizPlugin nor the Graphviz (dot) tool to render the graph. It is a pure Python implementation,
  3. it uses the Trac repository cache, which dramatically speeds up the generation of the graph
  4. it can be configured and extended to support custom repository organization

The older plugin code has been removed from the TracHacks.org repository.

Bugs/Feature Requests

Existing bugs and feature requests for RevtreePlugin are here.

If you have any issues, create a new ticket.

Author/Contributors

Authors
eblot
Contributors

Libraries

The RevtreePlugin uses the following libraries:

  • Genshi, the XML templating system used in Trac
  • Jquery a lightweight, yet powerful Javascript library
  • SVGdraw is a Python library that enables SVG generation

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