Visualize Git repo as Graphviz File

[Popaulol]

Summary 💡

Add the Ability to visualize the Commit History as a graph and output it as a graphviz file, similar to https://github.com/jlinoff/git2dot/. Additionally you could add functionality to visualize other Aspects of a git repo, like submodules.

I would personally volunteer to contribute this myself, although not right now as I do not have enough time to work on this at the moment. Before starting to work on anything i also wanted to get feedback of if this is even something that the project maintainers would consider accepting.
Also since this would be a fairly large undertaking, it probably shouldn't be my first contribution to this project. Although I have been learning and using rust for about 2 years at this point, I've never worked with a not toy sized project in Rust.

When it comes to how i would actually implement this. i have looked through your codebase a bit but not much and if I've understood everything correctly something like this should live in the gitoxide-core crate with driver code in porcelein. I don't think this would add any additional depencies to the project, as generating graphviz files isn't that hard to implement as I know from experience generating family tree graphs. However I have not looked at how traversing the commit history including commits, branches and merges is with your internal infrastructure at the moment, so that would be a thing to look at, before starting to work on anything.

I hope this wasn't to much rambling and to maybe see this gitoxide at some point.

~ Strabby

Motivation 🔦

If i undestood the goal of the ein binary crate correctly, this idea would fit the criteria of being a fairly useful tool to add to this project, making it easier and more user friendly to look through the commit history of a project.

[Byron]

I'd find a tool like this very interesting and think that producing a dot file would certainly be a good first step. Something I'd like for integration into ein though would be built-in visualization. Whenever a tool produces dot, I myself am stuck due to my unwillingness to deal with that extra step.

When looking at what's possible, the bevy debugdump crate probably serves as wonderful example.

My recommendation is to use gix to implement a program to do the job within your own repository to experiment with how it can be done. You are welcome to ask for feedback or help as to how to do things as well, and once there is a way to offer built-in visualization maybe even using bevy, maybe it can find a place as ein tool sub-command.

[Popaulol]

Thank you for the feedback on the idea, I'll take a look at how bevy works and how maybe implement this as my own tool myself.