File History

[andrews]

As I mentioned in a previous post, we're looking to move away from our ancient version of PVCS to a something with much higher performance and more modern features ... hence we're currently evaluating Vault.

Although PVCS is old, there's one aspect of it that we've grown very used to, and which few modern systems (including Vault) offer - a single view of a file's history including branches, accessible in one place. The image below should illustrate what I mean:-



At a glance I can see that the selected file "resultvw.cpp" was branched at versions 1.79 and 1.23. I can select any of the revisions in the branches or trunk and diff them against each other, or conduct a merge.

In Vault, however, I might have dozens of branches in the development history - how would I know which ones had modifications to my file? Even if I knew, to see the history I'd need to go fossicking around to view individual pieces of what's happened in the trunk and branches, putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle. I may be missing something, but Vault really seems to make it harder to know what's happened to a file, not easier.

Is this something you'd consider adding to Vault at some stage? Alternately, is there already a way of easily viewing a file's history (branches and trunk) together in one place?

[lbauer]

This functionality isn't currently available in Vault, nor is there a built-in way to view file's history together with the history of its branches.

We do have a feature request logged for a graphical view of history, though I don't know if or when we might implement it. I'll add your "vote," though, so it might get more attention.

[andrews]

Ok Linda, thanks.

We've looked at a lot of products, but hardly any have a feature like this - if you added it, it would be another compelling reason to choose Vault over your competitors.

[andrews]

Perhaps another thing you could consider. Let's say I've merged a branch into the trunk. In the branch I made 10 changes to the file, but all I see in the trunk file's history is the line where I merged it. Sure, the branch's history is there in text form, but that's not nearly as useful.

It would be really nice if I could right-click on the merged line, and have a "Show branch history" option to bring up in a separate window the history of the file in the branch.

While I'm on the topic, there's no way of accessing the Blame function from the history viewer (not that I can see anyway). It'd be great to be able to right-click on a revision and have Blame as an option to see who made which changes for the file at that version.

[andrews]

Something else I'd like to suggest, fwiw. If I bring up a file's history I can't see the ID of the changeset for each revision number. It would be great if the changeset # was listed beside each file revision, perhaps with a context-menu action that allowed me to access the changeset's details and even extract the repository as it was at that time.

The way it is now (and please correct me if I'm wrong), I have to take note of the date/time and comments for a revision, then look in the changeset history & search for it manually ... yes there's various tools for filtering the (huge) changeset list, but still this is a very awkward & non-intuitive process to have to follow.

[GregM]

I'll second that request. We use the txid as our build number, and there's no way to find that in the BUI as far as we can tell, we have to go through the command line.

[lbauer]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll log a feature request.

[Laurent]

Hi,

I recently switched to vault and I am very happy with it.

But I miss the revision graph from both tortoiseCVS and ViewVC/CVSGraph which are both very handy to navigate your files history.

Regards.
Laurent

[StuartHemming]

We do have a feature request logged for a graphical view of history, though I don't know if or when we might implement it. I'll add your "vote," though, so it might get more attention.

Could you add my vote too?

TVM.

[lbauer]

Will do.