[Quilt-dev] [ANNOUNCE] Quian

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

I am proud to let you know about Quian, my web-based, read-only
front-end to quilt. You can see what it looks like here:

  http://jdelvare.net2.nerim.net/quian/2.6/

A few weeks ago, I needed to know which version of Linux changed
a given line of source code. The new annotate command Andreas
Gruenbacher had added to quilt made me realize that quilt should be
able to answer this question if used on the proper data set. As the
whole Linux history since 2.4.0 represents quite a large amount of data
(3.5 GB!), I had to setup my playground on a server rather than my
local machine. This made me think of a web-based viewer for annotated
source code. This all started as an afternoon hack, and after a few
hours I had the answer to my question, and a minimalist web-based tool
based on quilt's annotate function.

After that, I polished the code a lot and added support for a few other
commands of quilt (series, files, diff), making Quian a more complete
tool that helps me do my daily work. Maybe others could have a use too,
which is why I am presenting it to you. At least now you know why I
wanted to extend the annotate command capabilities ;)

Being read-only by nature, Quian shouldn't be seen as a
contributor-oriented front-end of quilt like gquilt. It's more like a
webcvs tool for source trees those history is based on incremental
patches. Not sure there are many projects like that, but that's the
case of the Linux kernel and this alone probably justifies the amount
of work I invested in Quian.

The above link pointed you to the Linux 2.6 tree since 2.4.0. I also
have a 2.6 tree since 2.6.0 which includes -rc versions:

  http://jdelvare.net2.nerim.net/quian/2.6-wrc/

I think it'll give you a quite complete idea of what Quian can do.
Comments are welcome!

Big thanks to Andreas for writing the annotate command in the first
place. There would have been no Quian without it!

There are two concerns remaining:

1* File moves are not handled. As moving files around happens
frequently in the lifetime of a large project, some history is not
visible using Quian. I have plans to improve quilt's annotate command,
but it sounds like a quite complex task, as patch files do not clearly
notify file moves.

2* I had to modify quilt's diff command not do print warnings on
stderr, else my Apache's logs were full of these. This explains a
recent post of mine [1] to this list. I hope to come up with a solution
that will make everyone happy before I can release Quian's code to the
public. I want people to be able to use Quian with a stock quilt
installation.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2005-09/msg00005.html

Quian is written in PHP 4 (about 750 lines), and generates XHTML 1 + CSS
2 output.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare