467345 - Deki diff viewer sucks (should show just what changed)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

The diff viewer in DekiWiki sucks. It shows you the entire page, and highlights changes. In the old MediaWiki site, you'd just see the changes, which is all you usually care about when looking at a diff. Now you have to scan through the entire article to find what changed, which can be difficult. I would like the diff viewer to show just what changed, possibly with a little bit of context.

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

We've already complained about this to MindTouch, and this is going to be fixed in their next release.  In fact, I just got notice a few days ago that this is fixed already in their unstable trunk.

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Cool. :) I looked for bugs in bugzilla and didn't find any, and I wasn't sure what your policy with regards to upstream bugs was. (Do we always have a tracking bug here if it's something we care about?)

Comment 3

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Sometimes we do.  It gets confusing for me to track both, so I don't generally file them here myself, but if someone else does, I go with the flow.

Comment 4

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

You mentioned that this had been updated, so I checked it out, but it still sucks.
Compare:
https://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=en%2FUsing_the_Mozilla_symbol_server&action=diff&diff=0&revision=13 (sort of a best case here, because the change was up near the top of the page)
To:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mozilla_Firefox&diff=294345421&oldid=294345184

In the latter, you get a diff of *just the bits that changed* at the top of the page, which is generally the reason I clicked the diff view. In the former you still get the page with the changed bits highlighted, and also a side-by-side view down the bottom.

Comment 5

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

The RSS feed got changed; the display on the site has not. I've complained loudly to MindTouch -- they misunderstood what we wanted here and implemented it the way they thought we wanted it.

I've filed a ticket requesting this be fixed:

http://bugs.developer.mindtouch.com/view.php?id=6454

Comment 6

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

That looks like the wrong bug link.

(but thanks!)

Comment 7

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

This changed to just a side-by-side view, but it's still not great. I really just want to see the actual changes, and only that.

Comment 8

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Yeah, I know, I still have a bug with MindTouch on that; they promise to offer that. I just don't know when yet.

Comment 9

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Marking as resolved as it looks like MindTouch is now providing the view Ted requested (https://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=en/HTML/HTML5&action=diff&revision=50&diff=52). Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I will be sure the discussion held here informs our work on bug 671735, the bug to build a diff viewer into the Kuma platform.