Compare feature with frontend and single-file diff

[ghost]

• Gitea version (or commit ref): release/v1.1

Description

I cannot find a page or a button where I am able to choose two commits/tags/branches for comparsion. GitLab and GitHub provide such a feature. It is really helpful to undestand what is going on in your repo.

[gsantner]

Having an additonal "Compare" button (or/and a "changes since this commit") while viewing a commit would also be great

[mxmehl]

To give a bit more ideas of what I think would be helpful for a better compare feature:

At the FSFE we switched from trac/SVN to Gitea to maintain our website. With trac, our voluntary translators were able to see the diff of a file between two freely choosable commits.

For example, with the file work.en.xhtml we would like to see the difference between the current version/latest change (4e89fd20cc) and a freely choosable other date/commit (e.g. d25c06af1e).

In trac, this diff is quite helpful for translators to know which bits have changed in a file over a certain span of time to update an outdated translated version.

[mxmehl]

Can we please rename this issue, e.g. to "Compare feature with frontend and single-file diff" or so? The current title doesn't seem to catch what we discussed here.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs during the next 2 weeks. Thank you for your contributions.

[mxmehl]

I would still find this highly interesting and relevant in order to make Gitea more professionally usable.

[nunoperalta]

I would love to see this implemented.

[moay]

Any update here?

[jtran]

Now that #15723 is merged, scheduled for the 1.15 release, it may be what some people here are looking for. If not, I think it's one step closer.

[Arteneko]

IMHO it isn't, as this only allows to compare tags and branches, not two commit IDs (or, in more general, two valid git commit references, it being a commit ID, a branch name, a tag, etc).

While having the UI to make this feature accessible would definitely be good, being able to properly compare between two commits of the same branch would be a good start.

Right now, it simply says "it's from the same branch, no diff", and the hard association with PRs makes it pretty unclear.

[broukema]

This is a good wishlist item!

Being able to use the browser interface to show the differences for a single file between two given commits would be very useful. For example, this diff

https://codeberg.org/boud/gevolution/compare/0906a1e...fe756e7

is very heavy on my browser and gave me something like a memory race condition, forcing me to reboot my computer, even though I really only want to show others the changes in a single file. (Warning: It's still heavy each time I try it; I cancel before allowing the full download.)

An incomplete solution is to use the internal section links, for example:

https://codeberg.org/boud/gevolution/compare/0906a1e...fe756e7#diff-6

points directly to the diff that I wish to show. The URL could be something like

https://codeberg.org/boud/gevolution/compare/0906a1e...fe756e7/gevolution.hpp

Fediverse discussion thread: https://framapiaf.org/@boud/107138988265348900

[ikku100]

This feature would be much appreciated. I've used it a lot when using BitBucket in the past, and when using locally installed windows GUIs too. It's just that currently I am not allowed to install anything, otherwise it would be easy to work around this problem.