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Improve usability of `arc diff`
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Description

Users still consistently get hung up on understanding the behavior of arc diff. Some specific things we could improve:

  • My experience is that arc which is helpful to users, but users often don't know about it. arc diff should provide a clear path to discovery.
  • It might make sense to provide an abbreviated version of the arc which output in the arc diff output?
  • There's some very old, crufty default-base-revision code. We should remove it and move completely to base rules, which have proven powerful enough to express all desired behaviors.
  • The default behavior of arc diff should probably be to prompt / walk through?
  • Users still consistently have different expectations of what "review" means. We might be able to surface some of this documentation more prominently.
  • When the arc diff is updating a revision, we could attempt to introduce an arc:last rule which uses the base commit of the previous revision. This is complicated because we need the base commit to figure out the revision, but in the explicit --update case we know it and the general case we might be able to figure it out (e.g., by looking a few commits back in history?)

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Support Impact Almost all users doing code review are exposed to these workflows and we have room to significantly improve them.

eadler added a project: Restricted Project.Jun 17 2016, 7:06 AM
eadler moved this task from Restricted Project Column to Restricted Project Column on the Restricted Project board.Jun 17 2016, 7:09 AM
eadler moved this task from Restricted Project Column to Restricted Project Column on the Restricted Project board.Jul 4 2016, 9:19 PM

Changes for T9365 might cause some API changes (Moving lint/unit excuses from diff properties to harbormaster.sendmessage), so might be worth doing them around the same time.

42thcoder moved this task from vMajor to vNext on the Arcanist board.