View arbitrary commit in merge request for review purposes
Problem to solve
When practicing high velocity development and merge requests are very small, as a reviewer or author I want to be able to open previous commits that have already merged into the target branch in the merge request for context.
This could also be used for post-merge code review by creating an empty merge from the default branch, and simply adding any commit to the merge request.
This is similar to rationale for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/51823 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13950
Intended users
Primarily developers, although this benefits anybody performing a code review that wants to increase the scope of the review.
Further details
Proposal
| Mockup add commit | Mockup search commits | Mockup switching commits/comparison |
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As a reviewer, looking at a merge request, I will be able to add arbitrary commits by SHA to the merge request, that can be reviewed and commented on.
In this first iteration the interface would be highly minimal and involve directly adding a valid SHA, subsequent iteration would add search interface.
The key problems to solve in the first iteration are:
- switching to view a commit that was added, and differentiating it from a commit that may be in the merge request
- leaving comments on these commits
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Measure the number of people adding extra commits to code reviews.