Re: [PATCH] gitweb: add pf= to limit project list to a subdirectory

On Sat, 28 Jan 2012, Bernhard R. Link wrote:

* Jakub Narebski [off-list ref] [120128 15:53]:

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On Sat, 28 Jan 2012, Bernhard R. Link wrote:

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The project list takes often a very long time and searching in that list
takes the same time (and would also show projects not starting with the
text).

There are at least two ways to speed up getting projects list page.

There are other ways, but they are both limited and quite backward:
Instead of showing me the information I want (what is in that
directory), I guess to search in the larger pool of information needing
all sort of half-working tricks causing all kinds of other problems
working around the issue that much more information never used must be
collected first.

Subversion's ViewVC for example only shows what is in some directory
directory and available subdirectories. (That of course has the
disadvantage to make it harder to find a project one does not know
the subdirectory it is in, but why shouldn't gitweb offer the best of
both worlds?)

Well, ViewVC follows Subversion concepts... including broken-by-design
branching by copying ;-)


Anyway, I think I am getting convinced that supporting project filtering
by subdirectory, in a way similar to existing support for forks (and reusing
it implementation) could be a good idea.  

The one serious disadvantage of "pf=" is that it is not solution for a
faster gitweb homepage.  It works _only_ when you have pf=subdirectory/
link.

And I'd rather it worked with strict export, correctly and safely,
if "pf=" is to be included in gitweb.
 

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First is to limit number of projects shown, like e.g. http://repo.or.cz
which shows only search form and tag cloud, but no projects, or at least
paginate (divide into pages of e.g. 100 projects) list of projects.

But a page showing all projects (as long as it is possible) is something
I'd quite miss if it is gone. What I want is some way to have that and
to also be able to look at some subset interesting to me directly in an
effective way.

The http://repo.or.cz homepage has 'Show all projects' link, but it is
at explicit request. 

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Second solution would be to finally add caching support to gitweb,

But caching also means new projects or changes will take some time to
show up. And again it would not be a solution to by original problem.
(Showing effectively what is in some directory).

Well, it would solve "The project list takes often a very long time"
part of your problem.  Though very large list of projects can cause
performance problems rendering on client side, I guess...
 

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I'd for example like to be able to place a link to all projects shown
at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/ which are below mirrorer/ and get
a not having to wait for description information being extracted for all
the other projects.

I would prefer instead of introducing yet another arbitrary parameter
extend project searching, so that you can specify that you want to
search project names only (IIRC I have a patch for that, or beginnings
of one, in my StGit stack), and use prefix search by the way of regexp
search.

So

  pf=mirrorer/

would be

  s=^mirrorer/;sr=1;st=project_name

That might be a workaround, but still need to look at quite some amount
of unecessary data (i.e. it would need to run at least as long as a
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?a=project_index would not to load,
wouldn't it?)

Not with 'gitweb: Faster project search' from this series of commits

  # gitweb: Allow underscore in $searchtype ('st')
  # gitweb: Improve projects search form
  # gitweb: Option for filling only specified info in fill_project_list_info
  # gitweb: Faster project search
  # gitweb: Highlight matched part of project name when searching projects
  # gitweb: Highlight matched part of project description when searching projects

which does not search for description nor check for latest changes in
repository for repositories it doesn't show.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland