Re: The future of gitweb (long term goals)

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Michael J Gruber wrote:

Jakub Narebski venit, vidit, dixit 14.02.2011 20:39:

quoted

Now that we are talking about future of git, including breaking some
of backwards compatibility bugs / misdesigns for 1.8.0, perhaps it is
the time to discuss long term goals and the future of gitweb.

...

quoted

Current requirements are:
- Perl 5.8.x (for proper Unicode / UTF-8 support)
- core Perl modules: CGI, Encode, Fcntl, File::Find, File::Basename,...
- non-core Perl modules optional, needed for some of extra features
- backward compatibility (query params and path_info URLs)

I'd second that this is important for adaption by some main users.

You mean here backward compatibility of API (i.e. old links keep working),
isn't it?

quoted

- easy installation even without admin rights
- scanning for repositories (as an option)
- lightweight

All of these are important for instaweb also. 

Nowadays git-instaweb uses _installed_ gitweb, so neither easy 
installation, nor installing / running without admin rights is necessary
for use of gitweb in git-instaweb.  Strictly speaking neither is scanning
for repositories; I think git-isnatweb could generate file with list of
repositories (with repository) to show.

I consider instaweb a very
underrated feature! (It also needs some works of love, not just
appreciation, of course.)

Beside adding support for new web servers (like recently added 'plackup'),
what do you thing needs to be done?

quoted

1. Splitting gitweb into modules (packages), for better maintainability.

Also, this may help including other optional parts. The graph viewer as
used on repo.or.cz sets gitweb apart from quite a few alternatives and
would be used more widely if it were an optional module shipping with
gitweb. Just imagine instaweb with graphs ;)
Also, being part of gitweb, the viewer may attract a few coders.

Well, adding anything major (like e.g. write functionality, output caching;
perhaps graph of history is also in this category) really require split
gitweb.  It is getting hard to maintain gitweb as it is now.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland