Monday, February 04, 2008

Google Code SVN interface improvements

I use Google Code Project Hosting for a number of my open source projects. It gave me a common place to store my code under subversion and the integrated wiki allowed easy creation of on-line documentation. The web interface to subversion was rather limited only showing the current version of the repository. So I have tended to use the subversion tools on my computer for viewing revisions etc. In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new release of my ISAPI handler for WSGI (isapi_wsgi) and was surprised this morning to see the SVN web interface has changed dramatically and for the better.

Now when you access the subversion repository via the Source tab, you goto the Checkout view. This initially looks like the old view, until you notice that the Browse link has moved to a sub-menu and there is a new Changes link. If you select the Browse link, an explorer style interface is displayed. From this you can navigate around the repository. If you select a file, it is displayed with the code syntax coloured, with panels for the details of the last change, revision history and file info. This is a massive improvement over what was there before. Selecting the Changes link shows a view of the revision history. Viewing a revision allows access to either a nice colour diff view or side by side view.

So a big thank you to the Google Code Project hosting team for the improvements.