Figure out a way to display grader comments effectively

[borjasotomayor]

In chisubmit, students submit a project by tagging the specific commit they want to submit for grading (this is handled by the team-project-submit subcommand). Then, graders create a branch starting at that commit where they can add comments to the code.

Generating a diff between the grading tag and the head of the grading branch is trivial, but it would be nice to have a way to display the grader's comments more effectively. For example, there could be a subcommand that generates a PDF with a cover sheet including general comments by the grader as well as the scores obtained in this submission. Then, instead of just including all the code, the PDF could include the grader comments with some reasonable amount of context (e.g., the 10 lines below the comment). This would require figuring out a way to distinguish comments made by the grader from other comments.

[jzakaria]

have you considered requiring graders to add comments beginning with "BEGIN GRADER COMMENT" and ending with "END GRADER COMMENT" and then simply grabbing the next ten lines of code (preferably with line numbers)?
You could then use a library like PyPDF2 (https://github.com/mstamy2/PyPDF2/) to write those to a pdf file

[borjasotomayor]

That would probably be a good first approximation. I guess my main concern is that it's a not a given that the context for a comment is necessarily going to be the next ten lines of code. For example, it could be a general comment at the beginning of the file, it could be a short comment that only applies to the line immediately in front of it, etc.

Ideally, there should be a way to link a comment to a specific set of lines, or even to a specific part of a line. But I think that can be something that could be implemented in the longer term; as I said, something like what you describe is probably a good first stab at this.

[jzakaria]

ah that makes sense. i'll see if i can come up with a better way of referencing code in comments