Idea: Version selector page could allow comparing / diffing between two versions of the wiki

[rmunn]

Today I was curious to know what had changed on the wiki between v0.46.0 and v0.47.0, or between v0.47.0 and the latest Git version of the wiki. And while that information is available via the Git commit logs in the hyprland-wiki repository, I found myself wishing there was a way to just choose two versions of the wiki and view the differences on the wiki itself, similarly to how GitHub presents PR diffs. I.e. you could look at the wiki page itself, with a red or green background behind the deleted/added text.

I tried to see if I could implement this myself, but it's not as straightforward as I had hoped, because there are no tags on the hyprland-wiki repo so it's non-trivial to find out which commit contained the files as of v0.46.0. It's not hard — just look at the version history for the version-selector.md page — but it's not something that can be trivially automated: first someone would need to collect a list of commits and add tags to the appropriate commits before a script could be written to do the diffs.

Another thing that would need to be implemented for this idea would be that the wiki's theme would need to have some way to show additions and deletions, like the red/green background I mentioned before.

It wouldn't be a ten-minute project. But it should be more or less straightforward to do, perhaps a week or two of intermittent work. And I, for one, would find it useful to be able to see the differences between two Wiki versions. It would let me, for example, look at the config differences between the version I have installed (let's say, hypothetically, that that was 0.45.0) and the latest version (0.47.0) so I could more easily determine what config adjustments I need to make, if any, before updating. https://hyprland.org/news/ of course covers breaking changes, but sometimes it's nice to see every little detail of what changed.

[vaxerski]

I don't think the hugo theme we use or hugo in general has an easy way to do this @fufexan ?

[fufexan]

There's https://github.com/capnfabs/grouse but it doesn't build a page with changes, just shows you the git diff.

I think this is a great idea, and I've actually thought about this a while ago. We can already access previous (compiled) versions, so a HTML diff could be nicely displayed. This would require a custom layout page, with functionality that hugo may (not) provide.

This change has to happen on the backend, which is currently a private repo.

[vaxerski]

feel free to work on it, I wont

[fufexan]

I don't have time for it tbh

[rmunn]

Does anyone else have access to the backend repo besides the two of you?

If not, I'd be willing to make a PR if you want to invite me as a collaborator with read-only access. I can't promise speed — I might not deliver for a few weeks due to other commitments I have to put higher priority on — but I do have some HTML/Javascript experience (about 10 years or so), so I can probably do the work without much handholding, maybe without any handholding.

[fufexan]

I think it's only the two of us.

I'd be willing to make a PR if you want to invite me as a collaborator with read-only access.

That's up to vaxry. I don't have objections.

[vaxerski]

the backend isnt even written in html/js. It's hugo.