Thread: gitweb gitlog broken links to email archive

The web display of our gitlog at
 http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=log

contains links to individual commits, which is great.

It also tries (but fails) to link to email discussion.

For instance, in one of the recent commit-messages it says:


[...]
Discussion: 20150112154026.GB2092@awork2.anarazel.de


this links erroneously to http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=object;h=20150112154026

instead of to http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150112154026.GB2092@awork2.anarazel.de


This seems relatively easy to fix, and would make following the development process that much easier.

thanks,

Erik Rijkers

Erik Rijkers wrote:

> this links erroneously to
>   http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=object;h=20150112154026
> 
> instead of to
>   http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150112154026.GB2092@awork2.anarazel.de
> 
> 
> This seems relatively easy to fix, and would make following the development process that much easier.

How would you fix it?

I realized some time ago that using bare message-ids in commit messages
is not such a great idea, mostly because it's difficult to distinguish
them mechanically from email addresses.  Nowadays I (try to) prefix them
with http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ instead.  This is of course
already a valid URL, it's trivial to determine the message-id from the
full string, and if you're manually copying and pasting from the git
changelog to somewhere else you exactly know what portion to copy.  See
for example
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=0e5680f4737a9c6aa94aa9e77543e5de60411322

For some reason gitweb is not rendering those as links, though -- in
that commit message, it also grabs a string that looks like a SHA1 value
as a commit ID.  Silly little thing ... github seems to do the right
thing:
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/0e5680f4737a9c6aa94aa9e77543e5de60411322

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

On Tue, January 13, 2015 22:02, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I'm pretty sure this is not supported in gitweb. If it has some actual
> plugin functionality that would be something we could use but I'm not sure
> we want to fork github just for that functionality.
>

No, forking doesn't seem a good idea :)

I had a look at gitweb beforehand to see how it makes links. After all one would expect such a functionality to be
configurable.  But if you say if it's not there -- ah well, just bad luck.

thanks,

Erik Rijkers

On 2015-01-13 13:02:49 -0800, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> Previously committers have just pasted the full link I think - which would
> be easy enough to go back to.

Perhaps it is not surprising, given that it's my commit that's
referenced, but I find full links rather annoying. For one they're often
too long for one line. For another the message id seem to have been a
lot more stable over the years than actual archive links...

But either way, if we agree that archive links are better, I can
certainly live with that. I'd much rather have more people referencing
discussions using archive links than fewer using just raw message
ids.  I've spent far too much time already trying to correlate commits
with messages by looking at all emails from a timerange to find out what
'as discussed' refers to.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

-- Andres Freund                       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training &
Services