Subject: Re: Complex gitweb URL

From: Jakub Narębski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 23:20:30 +0200

W dniu 2016-07-20 o 21:24, CLOSE Dave pisze:
> I'm trying to create a URL that will always refer to the latest version 
> of a file stored under Gerrit. gitweb access is available. The man page 
> specification doesn't seem to work for me. Instead, I seem to need to 
> put most of the information into arguments (after the '?').
> 
> For example, the repo name includes several directories, so it doesn't 
> work to put it into the 
> ".../gitweb.cgi/<repo>/<action>/<revision>:/<path>?<arguments>" format. 
> Or, at least, I don't see how.

The fact that gitweb path_info-based URL uses <repo>/<action>... instead
of <action>/<repo> is in my opinion a bit of an unfortunate design error,
kept because of backward compatibility.

That said, gitweb can detect where the <repo> part ends and <action>
part begins, even for hierarchical multi-part repository name. See e.g.
http://repo.or.cz/git/zerocommit.git/tree/HEAD:/Documentation with
repository part being 'git/zerocommit.git' (a "fork" of git.git). So it
should work.

There are some cases however where the URL cannot be represented in
path_info form, and some parameters must be put as query arguments,
i.e. after '?'.

> 
> Instead I'm trying to use a URL in the format, 
> "http://site/gitweb/?args". If I use gitweb itself to navigate to my 
> target file, I see a URL in this format that contains several arguments, 
> "p=repo;a=blob;f=file;h=SHA;hb=SHA". If I use that URL directly, I get 
> my file. But those SHA values are not something I know how to determine 
> in advance. And I suspect they are unique to the specific version of the 
> file accessed, not always the latest as I want.
> 
> If I replace the hb=SHA argument with hb=HEAD, the URL still works. But 
> I have no idea what I can use to replace the h=SHA argument.

You can remove it.  'hb' (hash_base) and 'f' (filename) identify target
file in a repository unambiguously.

> 
> A complication is that the target file is not in the master branch. 
> Somehow I need to be able to specify the branch. I've tried putting it 
> as the h= argument but that results in "Reading blob failed". If I leave 
> out the h= argument entirely, gitweb responds, "404 cannot find file".

Did you forgot to set 'hb' parameter?  Is said file present in revision
given by the 'hb' parameter?

See e.g. http://repo.or.cz/?p=git/zerocommit.git;a=tree;hb=master;f=t
 
> Are these arguments documented somewhere? What is the recommended way to 
> construct a URL like I need?

Well, they are not described in the documentation, but you can check
the code and its comments.

Best,
-- 
Jakub Narębski