Gource – a software version control visualization tool | Hacker News Reader

Gource – a software version control visualization tool

gource.io

122 pointsColinWright21 comments

Years ago I was a man of many hats at a startup. One of my hats was build and release guy. We had a demo day for investors and I was like “what the heck do I show them?”

A Gource generated movie of the startup’s main repo saved the day. :-)

Edit: oh wait, it was probably codeswarm:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=221601

The project is a bit undocumented but the configuration offers a lot of possibilities. I'd recommend iterating with various config settings with `--load-config gource.conf`

A gource I configured recently of the Chrome DevTools team's activity: https://youtu.be/N48q9aiUMjI

Another plus for Mac users: it's an easy install on homebrew.

It's also on MacPorts.

(I discovered this halfway into writing my own portfile.)

My first introduction to Gource was a visualization of early Minecraft development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRjTyRly5WA

Same here, would be nice if that included the Client + Server merge..

Related, Forge has one as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0goY8bp59wc

Recently rediscovered tig (Text-mode interface for Git) and have been loving it:

https://jonas.github.io/tig/

I always install tig immediately after git.

I use it instead of less, tig is even less.

That's great but almost entirely unrelated to Gource.

Gource is incredibly powerful, but it does take a bit of playing around with all of the config options available to get your results just right.

I put together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTYJAWWZ2jQ for OctoberCMS, an open source content management framework that's been steadily gaining in popularity for the past four years.

This is so incredibly entertaining to use. Although you have to have a fair number of active daily contributors for it to actually be interesting to watch.

~25,000 of the most starred Github repos have Gource vids on YouTube.

Search "YOUR_REPO_URL gource" or "Evolution of YOUR_PROJECT_NAME gource"

Full command found in recent vid descriptions.

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Back in the day when YouTube didn't set reasonable user upload limits...

TBH, I was a little disappointed. The animations are neat, but I was hoping for something more practical.

I did recently learn about magit's magit-log-all command, and that's been really useful.

While gource is incredible I would love if it was more versatile. It would be incredible if it could be themable.

You can customize it to some extent. See ours for instance: https://youtu.be/iZjvVxbM3kY

On that note, I once saw it being (ab)used to visualize activity on a phpBB. I think they mapped threads to files and posts to commits or something like that. Interesting idea and I was wondering if you could apply it to other things as well.

Here's a script I hacked together that simplifies gource video generation a bit: https://github.com/dailymuse/gg

Homebrew users:

  brew install gource

What's practical application of this?

It's pretty.

We put the end visualisation on our team shirts. Unfortunately due to printing limitations it didn't end up looking that good, but it's still a neat idea.

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