Re: Complex gitweb URL

From: Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 20, 2016, 21:20 UTC
Message-ID: <578FEB1E.5060302@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <225e6ff4-178c-cd2a-6a05-b621f0ad4a84@us.thalesgroup.com>

W dniu 2016-07-20 o 21:24, CLOSE Dave pisze:

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> 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 '?'.

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> 
> 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.

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> 
> 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