Git graph on GitHub

Git graph on GitHub

[Tom Werner]

We've just pushed out an update to the Network Graph on GitHub this
evening that finally allows us to draw very large repositories
(including Git). We're mirroring the Git repo on the site and I
thought it might be interesting for people to see this visualization.
Enjoy!

http://github.com/git/git/network

Let me know if you have any ideas for improvements on the graph. I'm
always looking for ways to enhance it.

Tom Preston-Werner
github.com/mojombo

Re: Git graph on GitHub

[Michael J Gruber]

Tom Werner venit, vidit, dixit 15.10.2008 09:47:
> We've just pushed out an update to the Network Graph on GitHub this
> evening that finally allows us to draw very large repositories
> (including Git). We're mirroring the Git repo on the site and I
> thought it might be interesting for people to see this visualization.
> Enjoy!
> 
> http://github.com/git/git/network
> 
> Let me know if you have any ideas for improvements on the graph. I'm
> always looking for ways to enhance it.

Nice graph. The numbers in the grey bar are cut off around the middle,
though (FF 3 on Kubuntu Linux). Is there a way to display branch labels
other than master? Maybe the commit overlays could list all branches a
commit belongs to (like gitk does).

One nitpick regarding your git.git mirror: I doubt that people here
("the community") consider git-scm.com to be "the git homepage". I don't
want to go into the reasons and start a pointless thread, but since
git-scm.com is a fork of git.or.cz pointing to the latter (the root)
should make everyone happy.

Michael

Re: Git graph on GitHub

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi,

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 12:47:52AM -0700, Tom Werner wrote:
> We've just pushed out an update to the Network Graph on GitHub this
> evening that finally allows us to draw very large repositories
> (including Git). We're mirroring the Git repo on the site and I
> thought it might be interesting for people to see this visualization.
> Enjoy!
> 
> http://github.com/git/git/network
> 
> Let me know if you have any ideas for improvements on the graph. I'm
> always looking for ways to enhance it.

  it's generally nice, but I think it could be much more useful yet. :-)

  Generally, I find its information density very low. I see only tiny
dots connected by lines at the top of the screen (rest grey) and if I
want to know _what_ commits are actually there, I need to carefully
hover over the scattered tiny dots. So my question is, exactly what kind
of information do you seek to present primarily? Based on what I see,
the answer seems to be just "how hairy the project history is", and I'm
wondering if maybe some other class of information would be more
interesting. IOW, what about using that blank grey area to show the
commit subjects? ;-)

  Right now, your repository contains only the 'master' branch. I guess
you want to setup a --mirror repository instead of pulling?

  Also, it would be pretty nifty if you could tag lines of past topic
branches based on the merge commit message. E.g. mark the blue line
short in the past as pb/gitweb-tagcloud based on the 3e3d4ee merge. On
the other hand, I'm not sure how well would it work visually if the
topic branches are very short and merged right away.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
People who take cold baths never have rheumatism, but they have
cold baths.

Re: Git graph on GitHub

[Jakub Narebski]

"Tom Werner" <pubsub@rubyisawesome.com> writes:

> We've just pushed out an update to the Network Graph on GitHub this
> evening that finally allows us to draw very large repositories
> (including Git). We're mirroring the Git repo on the site and I
> thought it might be interesting for people to see this visualization.
> Enjoy!
> 
> http://github.com/git/git/network
> 
> Let me know if you have any ideas for improvements on the graph. I'm
> always looking for ways to enhance it.

First, I wonder a bit why did you choose horizontal layout of revision
graph, instead of displaying it vertically alongside log (log like
view) like graphical history viewers and other web interfaces offering
graphical log, e.g.
  http://lwn.net/Articles/140350/  (gitk screenshoot)
  http://repo.or.cz/git-browser/by-commit.html?r=alt-git.git
  http://people.proekspert.ee/peeter/git/git.php?p=git-git.git
I guess it is because you can show complicated history better, and
because of the "network" feature which is simply not visible for
git.git repository. On the other hand in vertical view you can display
commit subject alongside graph.

Second, the "go to commit" on click doesn't work for me, but perhaps
that is just I have to update my ancient web browser (Mozilla 1.17.2
for Linux, with Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124).  I would expect that after
clicking on commit I would get _whole_ commit message, not only commit
subject (first line / first paragraph of commit message).  Or at least
have some option (keyboard shortcut?) to toggle viewing full commit
message.  BTW. what does having commit sha-1 there give you?  You
can't select it for copy'n'paste, can you?

Third, it is nice to have refs markers for branches, but I wonder why
I cannot see refs markers for _tags_ (so one can easily see what is in
released version, and what isn't).  I also wonder why in commit
description box visible on mouseover you don't have refs markers there
(even if they are turned off for graph, for example for better
visibility because they obscure some line).

By the way, it might be not relevant because while (if I understand
correctly) graphs are ordered by commit date they are not aligned on
time axis, but the timeline of commits for given author on Ohloh looks
quite nice.  (Unfortunately this part of Ohloh is not open source,
although AFAIK it is also in Ruby).  Example:
  https://www.ohloh.net/projects/git/contributors/1194000913727
(but it doesn't use Flash).


Thank you for your work on GitHub  
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: Git graph on GitHub

[Pedro Melo]

Hi,

On Oct 18, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> By the way, it might be not relevant because while (if I understand
> correctly) graphs are ordered by commit date they are not aligned on
> time axis, but the timeline of commits for given author on Ohloh looks
> quite nice.  (Unfortunately this part of Ohloh is not open source,
> although AFAIK it is also in Ruby).  Example:
>  https://www.ohloh.net/projects/git/contributors/1194000913727
> (but it doesn't use Flash).

The timeline code is open source. They are using project timeline (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/ 
).

Best regards,
-- 
Pedro Melo
Blog: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/
XMPP ID: melo@simplicidade.org
Use XMPP!