Commit-by-commit review MVP: two little navigational arrows
Problem to solve
I often want to review a merge request commit-by-commit. This allows me to evaluate the logical progression of a feature over time, and to only briefly glance or (or completely skip over) large mechanistic changes. It leads to better-quality reviews, but GitLab hasn't introduced much tooling to help with this, to date.
Intended users
Code reviewers
Further details
At present, we list the commits in a separate tab in the MR window. One approach to commit-by-commit review is to ctrl+click each of those commits to open them in a new window, then look at them each in turn, closing the window once done. It's not great fun, but I have found myself doing it on occasion.
Proposal
Here's the page I get for an individual commit when doing that:
But imagine if it looked like:
We can add a link somewhere saying "commit-by-commit review" that simply navigates to the existing functionality with the first (oldest) commit loaded. We can then click the forward and back buttons to change between commits. We don't show the back button on the oldest commit, or the forward button on the newest.
Commenting on each page already works as expected. This is commit-by-commit review: budget edition!