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Bug 346954

Summary:	Make Git repositories more visible from GitWeb
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Alex Blewitt <alex.blewitt>
Component:	Website	Assignee:	phoenix.ui <phoenix.ui-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	webmaster
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:	stalebug

Description Alex Blewitt

2011-05-24 05:49:55 EDT

http://git.eclipse.org/ redirects to http://git.eclipse.org/c/ which lists all git repositories. The URLs of each are also shown (e.g. http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git/ for the ECF repository).

However, whilst you can check this out, it takes a significant period of time because the server doesn't support smart HTTP (or Git etc.)

There is some information buried documentation in the Wiki (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Git#Connecting.2C_cloning_a_repo) which suggests that there is a more optimised form that can be used, specifically

git clone git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/project/repo
git clone http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/project/repo

This means we can more efficiently check out the ECF repository with:

git clone http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git

But this information isn't immediately (a) obvious or (b) available for newbies.

Instead, I suggest we annotate the GitWeb interface with an instruction of how to check out a repository to make it more prominent for those that go to http://git.eclipse.org. Instead of saying "To use Git in Eclipse, check out the EGit project." we could instead have "To check out the project, use git clone http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/ followed by the name below.

We could even annotate the table, which describes the 'owner' and 'idle' to include the URL to use for checking out with HTTP (or Git or SSH).

Finally, this information is buried at the bottom of the per-git page. However, it's not obvious because of the branches and tags that push it down. For example, if I navigate to

http://git.eclipse.org/c/ecf/org.eclipse.ecf.git/

the cloning information doesn't show up on the first screen - it's down the bottom which you have to page down. Moving the 'clone' section to the top of the page would then put the cloning information in a consistent place and make it highly visible for those that want to get it out.

Comment 1 Denis Roy

2011-05-24 15:57:06 EDT

Wow, I didn't know you could clone from the CGit URLs.  Indeed, it's as slow as molasses flowing uphill in winter.

Since we're using CGit (and not GitWeb) changing the web page involves me hacking C code since none of the HTML is isolated from the application.  I'll take a look to see how easy/hard it would be to move the Clone URLs to the top of the page.  

The CGit project doesn't even seem to have a bug tracker to even suggest these types of enhancements, but I admit I haven't searched for more than 4 seconds.

Even if we make the "smart" URLs more obvious, I can't help but think of all the people who simply do not read, and who will go ahead and clone/work with the slow CGit server.  This will cause a number of problems:

1. Folks could assume webmasters are incompetent because the Eclipse Git server is slow
2. Folks could think Git is slow
3. Not using the smart servers will cause unnecessary burden on the Eclipse servers

With that in mind, I wonder if I should 'block' cloning from CGit?

Comment 2 Alex Blewitt

2011-05-24 17:28:57 EDT

(In reply to comment #1)
> Wow, I didn't know you could clone from the CGit URLs.  Indeed, it's as slow as
> molasses flowing uphill in winter.

Yup. That's why people used to assert git over http was slow :-)

> Since we're using CGit (and not GitWeb) changing the web page involves me
> hacking C code since none of the HTML is isolated from the application.  I'll
> take a look to see how easy/hard it would be to move the Clone URLs to the top
> of the page.  

That would be good, thanks. Other thoughts:

Instead of having git.eclipse.org redirect to git.eclipse.org/c/ we could have our own list of projects with clone information, much like we do for the dev.eclipse.org repositories. The links could include "browse" and "clone" and the links could take you to the gitweb project page. 

You could probably generate that page once a day. We don't really need to see "last commit" on the project list, and the set of git repos probably doesn't change that frequently. 

> With that in mind, I wonder if I should 'block' cloning from CGit?

Yes, probably a good idea. /c/**/info/ should probably do it. But it would be good to do it in conjunction with a revamped landing page for those of us who don't read :-)

Comment 3 Eclipse Genie

2015-01-06 16:11:31 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

--
The automated Eclipse Genie.

Comment 4 Eclipse Genie

2016-12-27 11:47:54 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

--
The automated Eclipse Genie.

Comment 5 Eclipse Genie

2018-12-18 06:08:23 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

--
The automated Eclipse Genie.

Comment 6 Eclipse Webmaster

2018-12-18 09:56:22 EST

Closing as 'fixed' since the vhost is configured to try and stop people from cloning.

-M.