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We are using the named-branch-per-feature model, and it's working really well. Creating reviews is usually not a problem when a branch has one or a few commits over a short period of time, because they're fairly close together in the history and easy to find and add to a review.

However, when a branch has been around for several days and has many commits in it, it can be hard to track them all down to add them to the code review.

My request is to add a feature that allows you to click on the head of a named branch and submit a code review for all changes made in that branch.

flag	asked Apr 29 2011 at 19:11 Saeed 477●2●7

	We would like something similar to this as well, but it's more interesting for us to review the branch as a whole, rather than as a sum-of-it's-parts. That is, we want to be able to compare the current state of a branch against the branch it's going to be merged back into (usually default). We don't actually care about some of the files (which are changed identically in the branch and default because default was merged into the branch at some point). – Chris Phillips May 2 2011 at 20:58
	@Chris, I think we're saying the same thing. I want to be able to submit a code review that contains the diff between the head of a named branch and the head of "default". This is effectively what happens now if you create a review that includes all changesets in the named branch, but tracking all of them down can be challenging. – Saeed May 2 2011 at 23:27
	@Saeed, yeah, you're right - we want the same thing here! :) – Chris Phillips May 12 2011 at 18:01

Saeed · Answer 1 · 2011-05-11 21:36:18Z UTC

I figured out a way to make this easier with existing tools, though it would still be great if Kiln could automate it completely.

Let's say you have a branch named case123 and want to review the diff between that and default. You can use the following steps:

hg update default
hg merge case123
// handle merge conflicts, build and test, etc
hg branch case123review
hg commit

This merges case123 into default, then saves that into a new branch. Then you can submit a code review with the single changeset from the case123review branch. This will produce a clean diff of the current state of both branches.

For short-lived branches with just a couple of commits, I wouldn't bother with this and I would just the Kiln UI to select all changesets that went into the branch. But for longer-lived branches that have had many commits and even a few merges, these steps simplify the process of creating a review because you only have to worry about choosing a single changeset in Kiln.

Kevin Gessner · Answer 2 · 2011-05-12 19:07:51Z UTC

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Thanks for the feature request, Saaed (and Chris). I've opened a case to consider this for a future version.

answered May 12 2011 at 19:07

Kevin Gessner♦♦
4,530●6●19

@Kevin: Any chance you've got an update on this? This is becoming more of a problem for us as we tackle some larger features and branches with more changesets. We're finding that we can't effectively use Kiln's review tool for a lot of our more important reviews, which saddens us! – Chris Phillips Jun 20 2011 at 19:20

Feature request: Submit a code review for all changes in a named branch

2 Answers