Re: GSoC 2010: "Integrated Web Client for git" proposal

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: Apr 19, 2010, 12:27 UTC
Message-ID: <vpq8w8j1vb7.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20100419090734.GA10939@machine.or.cz>

Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 01:08:26PM +0530, Pavan Kumar Sunkara wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> > On the other hand, a proposal about giving multiple clients access to
>> > their own individual server-side checkouts (ala "workspace" in DELTA-V)
>> > would require some mechanism to maintain the state on the server end, and
>> > session management would be one ingredient necessary to achieve that.
>
> But what if I will want to give a link to my "workspace" to someone
> else? You can embed workspace id in the URL, in fact you would probably
> just use it instead of project name completely naturally. I still don't
> see any need for sessions.

One use-case I'd like this work to be able to address is:

Many of my colleagues don't want to use Git. If I send them a mail with the cut-and-paste-ready "git clone" command, they'll still reply asking for an attachment to an email, and they'll send me their modifications the same way.

In a good write-enabled web interface, they'd browse the repository online, pick a file, and the download page would point them to a URL containing the filename, and the base commit, with a form to upload a new version of the file.

Some time later, they could re-use the same URL, and upload the modified version of the file. Actually, I could even do the first step myself, and send them an email with the attachment and the URL, and they'd upload their version whenever they want. The upload should create a commit in a separate branch, starting from the base commit contained in the URL. I could do the merge myself later in case of non-fast forward.

That's a real senario, and I believe it would be a rather common use-case of a web-based git client: a power-user prepares the work, and sends well-prepared URL to newbies. This really requires GET parameters.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/