Re: Make Gitweb behave like Apache mod_userdir

From: J.H. <warthog19@eaglescrag.net>
Date: Nov 18, 2009, 00:00 UTC
Message-ID: <4B03391A.90808@eaglescrag.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vskccaf4q.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> "J.H." <warthog19@eaglescrag.net> writes:
> 
>> For starters I think overriding the /~<user> (specifically the ~ here)
>> is going to be a bad idea no matter what you do and gives the wrong
>> impression about what / how the request is being responded to.  You
>> might want to try and pick a different delimiter or re-work the rule
>> so that you could have something like:
>>
>> 	http://git.kernel.org/<gitweb urls>
>> 	http://git.kernel.org/user/<gitweb urls>
> 
> I am not objecting but showing my ignorance, but why is it a bad idea to
> allow
> 
> 	http://git.kernel.org/~junio/git.git
> 
> to map to /home/junio/pubilic_git/git.git when
> 
> 	http://www.kernel.org/~junio/index.html
> 
> maps to /home/junio/public_html/index.html already?

I'm not objecting to the mapping, I'm objecting to the use of the ~ specifically, since that's the default for mod_userdir - it's more or less a race condition waiting to happen with respect to does mod_rewrite get to and process it first or does mod_userdir.

Case in point should:

assuming that www.example.com (to get away from the specifics of kernel.org) is running gitweb but you also wanted to allow users to show their ~/public_html directories then

	http://www.example.org/~junio/

could be ambiguous as to what should / is servicing the url.

Now in reality it should work because of how apache is setup, but I would argue it's a bad practice to overload the '~' designator like that for use in gitweb specifically.

If you have mod_userdir disabled / not available this isn't an issue, but making that assumption might be a bad idea.

- John 'Warthog9' Hawley