After v9 upgrade, the Merge Request details page is more narrow than the rest of the site
Summary
I just upgraded out Gitlab-ce install from 8.13 (iirc) to 9.0. Besides the upgrade issues (oh boy!), one thing I noticed is that the Merge request details view is more narrow than it should be. It's like it's not using the full width of the theme (when using the fixed theme)
Steps to reproduce
Make sure you're using the fixed width theme. Navigate to Merge Requests in a project, and then open a merge request. The main page contents will be forced in a more narrow container than in the rest of the website
This CAN be reproduced even here!
What is the current bug behavior?
The page is forced to be more narrow than it should be
What is the expected correct behavior?
The page should use the full width of the theme (1200px?)
Relevant logs and/or screenshots
Output of checks
This bug happens on My local install This bug happens on GitLab.com
Activity
/cc @tauriedavis
added frontend ~19492 ~12980 ~13921 labels
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@artiomchi Thanks for the report and the screenshots to demonstrate
Upon further checking, seems like it's smaller because it shares the 1200px container with the sidebar, even though it's "disconnected" from the main body, and can even be collapsed.
Expanding it makes no difference to the main page container.
Looking further into this, some classes have .limit-container-width added to them, which limits their width to 990px;
The change seems to have been deliberate, although I'm not sure what the reasons are, since it makes the diff harder to read :(
The changes were made to reflect a more readable line length. For merge requests specifically, the change is only seen for inline views. Side by side view uses an expanded width. You can read more about the change here https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13680
Any chance to open this up for discussion?
Upon reading that thread, I see the points about making the issue text/comments more readable - from this point of view, the change has made definitive improvements.
My main concern is the merge requests code blocks, which are now considerably more narrow than before. While it is true that in side by side view it uses an expanded width, I would really like either the default or to have an option to display the code in the wider 1200px box.
If I go to the repository browser and open any files, the code is displayed in a container that uses the full width of the page. But in merge requests, the code is forced in a narrow container, which causes unnecessary line breaks in code.
The side by side view is different, since it's rendered seemingly outside the container, and uses 100% of the visible screen space.
I can provide further screenshots, if needed
Well, sure, but I think that different rules apply to code editors/display compared to regular text.
A standard message/comment doesn't have as many line breaks, so it can easily fill the full width of the screen. As such, narrowing containers for this kind of content makes perfect sense, and makes it more legible.
Code, on the other hand, is made up of a collection of instructions, split up into separate lines. While most code fits within the 80/100 characters per line, sometimes it does not. But the main point is - using the full width of the screen for a code editor has never made it harder to read code (hence IDEs don't do that), since most code adheres to that guideline.
My point is, limiting the width of the code view makes no practical sense, and in the cases when you DO have longer lines of code, it actually makes it less readable.
Plus, I believe in consistency, so I think it would make a lot of sense to display the code files in the merge requests at the same width as they are displayed in the standard repository browser.
I'm glad GitLab isn't completely opposing the idea, and I hope it gets another look at at some point (hopefully soon) :)
