As you may or may not know, the KDE git infrastructure currently has two assets for viewing repository data — Redmine and gitweb.

Redmine powers Projects at http://projects.kde.org and is intended (pending theming and greater population of data) to be the real “home” of all of KDE’s projects, putting project information, news, repository browsing and more in a pleasant UI. Each project with a git repository will have a project on Redmine as well as on ReviewBoard.

However, Redmine doesn’t have *all* of the git repositories available. This is because in the short term at least there won’t be projects created for user clones of repositories. In addition, the “scratch” area, where KDE developers can maintain their own repositories for anything they wish (that’s KDE-related of course) will never be put in Redmine.

(The reason for this is that if a developer just wants to play around with some code, or perhaps wants a location to store their (versioned) emacs/vi config files or some such thing, there’s no reason that needs to be an “official project” with an entry in Redmine and ReviewBoard. Similarly, if a developer is writing new code but feels that the code is far too raw to actually have others having eyes on it, we believe it should be up to them when they decide to have it put into a project on Redmine and ReviewBoard.)

So, let’s say you’ve just pushed some code. Where would you go to see it on the Web — Redmine or gitweb? I took a first cut at solving this problem by, based on the location of the repository you pushed to, spitting out a Redmine- or gitweb-based URL in the output sent back to your git client. Unfortunately, these were quite long. For example:

http://projects.kde.org/projects/repo-management/repository/revisions/dcd43aacaa806a7a32779a0215b7ab8ed7b05dc8

This isn’t so nice. Especially if your terminal is only 80 characters wide.

So, I came up with a solution — commits.kde.org. It’s a simple Sinatra/Thin-based web application that parses a URL generated by the gitolite hook and forwards you to the correct place. If the repository is on Redmine, it forwards you there; otherwise it forwards you to gitweb.

These aren’t tiny URLs in the style of bit.ly, but they’re deterministic and not based on a database backend. In fact, you can construct these on your own and they’ll still resolve. The form is

http://commits.kde.org/<repoid>/<commitid>

The repoid can be found by looking in the URL that is spit out when you push your code. It stays fixed for each repository (and if it does change, aliases can be added to keep old URLs alive).

In this format, the above URL goes down to

http://commits.kde.org/99c5fdd6/dcd43aacaa806a7a32779a0215b7ab8ed7b05dc8

By doing this, the URL size drops from 110 characters-ish (depending on the name of the project, whether it’s on gitweb or Redmine, and so on) to a fixed 72; enough to make it fit on a single line in most terminals (with the “remote: ” prepended to the git output it’s 80 characters total), and to make it relatively tweet-/dent-able if you don’t need to include much other information in the post.

Update: I should mention that you can shorten those URLs further, but how much depends on when you start getting a collision. If gitweb encounters an ambiguous commit ID, it will 404, without giving information as to why it returned a 404. Redmine, however, will simply return one or the other of the commits — so you may get the wrong commit shown without even realizing it. Worse, this could also mean that URLs that were shorter (very short) but once worked may not work later if a collision comes up later. So you can use as many or few of the hash characters as you want, but I’d stick with at least 8 or so for safety. *Also*, right now the webapp only matches full hash values in Redmine’s database, so if you shorten it you will always get a gitweb URL.

For anyone interested, the current webapp code is GPLv2+ and can be found right here.

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