Kompare support for patch and difference reviewing

[Aleix Pol]

Hi list,
As some of you might know right now, I've been trying to get the KomparePart
to make KDevelop useful for reviewing patches and checking the changes from
the VCS support. Now I've locally got it to work in an ugly and weird way
you're not interested in.

Since there are some things I'm not sure of, I'll expose them to you so that
we can find the best solution.

My first idea was to get the Kompare part to be used as a Document. Looks
logical and would perfectly fit in a new review area (which could be the
nowadays test area).
Problems I see:
- It's not really suitable to see the differences in places like the the
history dialog. First of all it would show on the background and it would be
(ideally) readonly in case none of the versions compared are the local one.
That makes me think that having the VcsDiffWidget using just the Kompare
part would be good (checking if one of the version is the Base would be a
+1, but not that necessary, being able to generate a patch from that would
be just fine).

- Sublime wants us to have a URL for each of those opened documents (If I
understood properly). Here my idea would be to have some URL like
vcs://the/base/path?from=123;to=321 so, in other words, have the arguments
to pass to IBVC::diff so that the document knows what information he needs.
The other could be to have some way to pass it some VcsDiff tuple with all
the needed stuff (like having the slot that receives that in an empty
PatchDocument).

- The KomparePart has plenty of tool buttons, which we need for patch
reviewing, but not all the time. Plus the tool bar is merged with the main
one and i can't hide it when I don't need it (because i might need the rest
of the stuff).

Another way would be to enhance the VcsDiffWidget so that it's useful for
all use cases. That would work, but I don't think we want to have another
window just for that, looks workaround-ish.

I'm not really used to the Ui code (as you will see from what I've said). So
if I might have had some bad assumptions.

If you have a good idea about how to do that, tell me. And I'll do my best
:P.

Thanks,
Aleix
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdevelop-devel/attachments/20090805/20d55dab/attachment.html>