Differential User Guide: FAQ

Phorge Administrator and User Documentation (Application User Guides)

Common questions about Differential.

Why does an "accepted" revision remain accepted when it is updated?

You can configure this behavior with differential.sticky-accept.

When a revision author updates an "Accepted" revision in Differential, the state remains "Accepted". This can be confusing if you expect the revision to change to "Needs Review" when it is updated.

Although this behavior is configurable, we think stickiness is a good behavior: stickiness encourage authors to update revisions when they make minor changes after a revision is accepted. For example, a reviewer may accept a change with a comment like this:

Looks great, but can you add some documentation for the foo() function before you land it? I also caught a couple typos, see inlines.

If updating the revision reverted the status to "Needs Review", the author is discouraged from updating the revision when they make minor changes because they'll have to wait for their reviewer to have a chance to look at it again.

Instead, the "Accepted" state is sticky to encourage them to update the revision with a comment like:

• Added docs.
• Fixed typos.

This makes it much easier for the reviewer to go double-check those changes later if they want, and the update tells them that the author acknowledged their suggestions even if they don't bother to go double-check them.

If an author makes significant changes and wants to get them looked at, they can always "request review" of an accepted revision, with a comment like:

When I was testing my typo fix, I realized I actually had a bug, so I had to make some more changes to the bar() implementation -- can you look them over?

If authors are being jerks about this (making sweeping changes as soon as they get an accept), solve the problem socially by telling them to stop being jerks. Unless you've configured additional layers of enforcement (by using Herald), there's nothing stopping them from silently changing the code before pushing it, anyway.

How can I enable syntax highlighting?

You need to install and configure Pygments to highlight anything else than PHP. See the pygments.enabled configuration setting.

What formatting can be used in comments?

Phorge implements a markup language similar to other markup languages like Markdown and Wiki markup. See Remarkup Reference.

What do the very light green and red backgrounds mean?

Differential uses these colors to mark changes coming from rebase: they are part of the diff but they were not added or removed by the author. They can appear in diff of diffs against different bases.

Next Steps

Continue by:

• returning to the Differential User Guide.