I would suggest to truncate the message by default to something like 200 characters or so and add an option to show the rest (either via JS or form).

wolfgang added on 2010-10-10 12:43:57:
This i a little bit complex.

Timeline can be displayed in 2 ways:

• no block markup - here we can cut the text simply
• using block markup - the problem is, to close all used elements in the html hierachy and do it in a way, not destroying the layout.

anonymous claiming to be anonymous2 added on 2010-10-10 13:30:24:
What about a setting to only display the first paragraph in the timeline? Then it would be possible to have a summary line (followed by an empty line) + a more detailed description that is only visible on the info page.

wolfgang added on 2010-10-10 15:15:27:
If block rendering is activated, the commit messages will be formated like wiki pages.

Inside wiki pages it's possible to use the fossil internal wiki format combined with pure html. If a commit message uses for example tables, i cannot simply stop rendering at the first end paragraph after n characters. I t can be, that this paragraph is inside a table cell. Cutting the commit message may corrupt the complete gui display.

To handle this situation, fossil has to

• parse it's own html - this might be possible
• parse all currently unhandled html - we have no code for this!

For me, the effort to handle shortened html is to much for this. The only thing, i could accept would be, to offer the opportunity to shorten the simplified text display but leave the block rendering variant unchanged.

drh added on 2010-10-11 13:50:22:
Fossil already gives you the capability to limit the length of timeline messages. Under the Admin/Timeline menu, you can specify the maximum length of any timeline message. If the maximum length is 0, then there is no limit. That is the default. Setting a limit of 350 to 500 bytes seems to work pretty well for the pkgsrc repository.