Subject: Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Use config file or file for repository owner's name.

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 01:17:07 +0100

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Johannes "Dscho" Schindelin wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:
>> Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:
>>> Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:
>>> 
>>> Rephrasing to be constructive (but remember, this is all post 1.5.4).
>>> 
>>>  * we would need for historical reasons to keep supporting
>>>    description and cloneurl for some time.  There may be some
>>>    others, but the goal should be to deprecate and remove these
>>>    ad-hoc one-file-per-piece-of-information files.
>>> 
>>>  * we also need for historical reasons to keep supporting some
>>>    other stuff found in $git_dir/config of the project.
>>> 
>>> If the config reading interface in gitweb is reasonably fast and 
>>> cheap, we can move the existing description/cloneurl to gitweb config 
>>> when deprecating them.  New ones such as "owner" would naturally fit 
>>> there.
>> 
>> Currently gitweb parses repo config file _once_, using one call to 
>> git-config -z -l.
>> 
>> We could simply add description to the projects_list file, but it will 
>> be a bit backwards incompatibile change.
> 
> Not if you say "the config overrides the description/cloneurl file", i.e. 
> when there is a description or a cloneurl from the config, don't even 
> bother to stat the single-line files.

Errr... what I wanted to say there is instead of current format of
'projects_list' file which is:
  <URI-encoded project path> SPC <URI-encoded owner> LF
add also project description to that file, so the format would be
  <URI-encoded project path> SPC <URI-encoded owner> SPC
    <one-line project description> LF
(project description doesn't need to be URI encoded). This means
avoiding reading $git_dir/description (and in rare cases also avoiding
gitweb.description in $git_dir/config).

This is of course a bit backwards incompatibile.

> That would help transition, and still be backwards compatible.  (BTW this 
> resembles what we did for the .git/remotes/* -> .git/config transition.)

Note that some of info is needed for 'projects_list' view, and some only
for the 'summary' view.  For the 'projects_view' page we would want to
avoid, I think, calling "git config -z -l" per repository (or opening
$git_dir/config file and [limited] parsing it inside gitweb in Perl,
like git-cvsserver does).  For 'summary' view we want usually to read
repo config file for features nevertheless, and is only once per
web-page, so we don't avoid it then.

Currently for 'projects_list' view we have, when $projects_list is
a directory (this includes situation when it is undef, and fallbacks
to $projectroot):
 1. Call git-for-each-ref to get last modification time
 2. Read $git_dir/description file for description (which is generated
    by default template, so is usualy present, if in useless form),
    fallback to git-config / reading $git_dir/config, gitweb.description
 3. Check owner of $git_dir (stat + getpwuid)

With the addition of $git_dir/owner and gitweb.owner we would have
 3'. Read $git_dir/owner file, usually not present,
     fallback to gitweb.owner (which means reading and parsing
     repo config!),
     fallback to $git_dir owner (stat + getpwuid)
so after consideration I think that adding gitweb.owner is a bit of
a stupid idea from performance point of view, at least till we have
'projects_list' caching. Only $git_dir/owner would be better.
 
BTW. what about filesystems where file / directory does not have
an owner?

Another solution would be using $projectroot/.gitconfig, with simplified
syntax easy parseable by Perl, with gitweb.<repo path>.<config>, where
<config> is limited to 'description', 'owner' and 'url', and 
gitweb.description for fallback description, gitweb.owner for fallback
owner and owner for set of repositories, gitweb.baseurl for base URLs
(gitweb.<repo>.url = gitweb.baseurl/<repo>).

This would limit repo paths to not have embedded newlines in them, but
this is not I think serious limitation :-)

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland