Feature Request: Improving the utility of the Merge Request for Code Review
Everyone can contribute. Help move this issue forward while earning points, leveling up and collecting rewards.
Description
My company uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab EE and we like the tool for it's ability to control git branch & workflow permissions, and to run our CI/CD pipelines. Unfortunately, our team continues to have issues with the functionality of the merge request as a tool to facilitate code review.
Specifically, the Merge Request UX is lacking in the following ways:
- Ability to quickly navigate the diff
- Navigation
- Filtration
- Ability to move between diff view and whole files
- Need to be able to comment on a part of the file that perhaps isn't in the diff
- Ability to make comments with visibility at different levels:
- Review-level comments
- File-level comments
- Line-level comments
- The Discussion tab is a stream-of-consciousness
- Difficult to extract important high-level comments from notification clutter
- Ability to mark only a subset of files as relevant for review
- A merge request may include 3rd party or generated code; there is no way to hide this in the MR page and it can degrade ability to navigate the MR and affect the time it takes for the page to load.
- Ability to apply labels to individual comments
- Ability to filter the discussion based on comment labels
Sadly, we've had to bring up an Atlassian Crucible server to address the limitations of the GitLab Merge Request UX. We really want GitLab to be our sole UX interface from idea to production!
Proposal
I'd like the GitLab UX team to consider my feedback above. The most important changes for our team include:
- An ability to apply labels to specific comments and to filter the discussion using these labels
- Improved navigation of the diff (file tree, etc)
- Ability to mark files as included or excluded from the review (e.g., for generated or 3rd party code)