Aardvark FTW!

I should probably let someone else announce this so it's not shameless tooting of my own horn, but whatever:

http://www.djangodash.com/results/

First Place - Aardvarkia (out of 52 entrants)

• Benjamin Pollack
• Tyler Hicks-Wright

A code review tool with Mercurial integration.

(Aardvark reference for those who didn't get it.)

Some background: DjangoDash is a code sprint/competition to make more apps for the Django Python Web Framework.

Ben and I have been talking about code review tools, and have tried to use a couple, including ReviewBoard from VMWare and Rietveld Code Review by Python inventor Guido van Rossum, both of which use Subversion. We found their workflows to be too tedious to use frequently; you have to manually create a unified diff of all your changes and upload it to the server, while making sure not to accidentally check any of those changes in.

So, we decided to enter the dash with a code review tool based on Mercurial that uses its distributed nature to make the workflow easier. Now you just make your changes, start a new review at the website (which creates a new repo on the server for you), push your changes to your review repository, and assign the review to the reviewer. They can then accept it, in which case it gets pushed into the main repo, or reject, in which case it comes back to you and you have a chance to fix the problems. That way, all of your changes are versioned and periodic merges are done with the main repository so the branch history is always up to date. Moreover, a review history can be added to the check-ins after the review is approved, so the entire history is kept intact.

Right now we're planning it only for internal use, but I will definitely post if we decide to go open source with it.

Posted June 16, 2008 - Two Comments