Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to - lack of context, improper format and the inherent readability issues that - raw patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed - to fix that by offering increased context, linking to sections, and - integrating with Bonsai, LXR and CVS.
Patch viewer allows you to:
| View patches in color, with side-by-side view rather than trying - to interpret the contents of the patch. |
| See the difference between two patches. |
| Get more context in a patch. |
| Collapse and expand sections of a patch for easy - reading. |
| Link to a particular section of a patch for discussion or - review |
| Go to Bonsai or LXR to see more context, blame, and - cross-references for the part of the patch you are looking at |
| Create a rawtext unified format diff out of any patch, no - matter what format it came from |
The main way to view a patch in patch viewer is to click on the - "Diff" link next to a patch in the Attachments list on a bug. You may - also do this within the edit window by clicking the "View Attachment As - Diff" button in the Edit Attachment screen.
To see the difference between two patches, you must first view the - newer patch in Patch Viewer. Then select the older patch from the - dropdown at the top of the page ("Differences between [dropdown] and - this patch") and click the "Diff" button. This will show you what - is new or changed in the newer patch.
To get more context in a patch, you put a number in the textbox at - the top of Patch Viewer ("Patch / File / [textbox]") and hit enter. - This will give you that many lines of context before and after each - change. Alternatively, you can click on the "File" link there and it - will show each change in the full context of the file. This feature only - works against files that were diffed using "cvs diff".
To view only a certain set of files in a patch (for example, if a - patch is absolutely huge and you want to only review part of it at a - time), you can click the "(+)" and "(-)" links next to each file (to - expand it or collapse it). If you want to collapse all files or expand - all files, you can click the "Collapse All" and "Expand All" links at the - top of the page.
To link to a section of a patch (for example, if you want to be - able to give someone a URL to show them which part you are talking - about) you simply click the "Link Here" link on the section header. The - resulting URL can be copied and used in discussion. (Copy Link - Location in Mozilla works as well.)
To go to Bonsai to get blame for the lines you are interested in, - you can click the "Lines XX-YY" link on the section header you are - interested in. This works even if the patch is against an old - version of the file, since Bonsai stores all versions of the file.
To go to LXR, you click on the filename on the file header - (unfortunately, since LXR only does the most recent version, line - numbers are likely to rot).