Loggerhead and friendly URLs

[Michael Hudson]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:00:09 +0300, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> wrote:
> One of the things I dislike about loggerhead is the cumbersome URLs.
> Example:
> 
>   file list:
>     http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~zodbbrowser-dev/zodbbrowser/trunk/files
> 
>   file list in a subdirectory:
>     http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~zodbbrowser-dev/zodbbrowser/trunk/files/head:/src/zodbbrowser/
> 
>   single file:
>     http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~zodbbrowser-dev/zodbbrowser/trunk/annotate/head:/src/zodbbrowser/__init__.py
> 
>   This is not something you can remember and type out of the blue.
>   Well, maybe you can; I can't.  (When I switched from ViewVC to Trac I
>   fell in love with it because I could suddenly generate correct URLs
>   in my head.)
> 
>   I often try to go from a single-file view to the directory by erasing
>   the last URL component, only to end up in a 404 page.

Yeah, this sucks.  I even have a branch that fixes this, but as seems to
be a bit of a loggerhead disease of mine, it's all intermingled with
other changes that aren't really ready.

Loggerhead internally has some misfeatures that make it harder than it
should be to decide 'late' which template to use for a particular
request.

>   For extra annoyance there are colons in the middle of the URL.  They
>   break word completion in an xterm, splitting the URL in half when I
>   copy and paste.  Likewise they break gnome-terminal's URL detection.
> 
> Compare with Trac:
> 
>   file list:
>     http://mg.pov.lt/pyspacewar/trac/browser/trunk
> 
>   in a subdirectory:
>     http://mg.pov.lt/pyspacewar/trac/browser/trunk/src/pyspacewar
> 
>   single file:
>     http://mg.pov.lt/pyspacewar/trac/browser/trunk/src/pyspacewar/main.py
> 
> Compare with Bitbucket:
> 
>   file list:
>     http://bitbucket.org/bbangert/pylons/src
> 
>   in a subdirectory:
>     http://bitbucket.org/bbangert/pylons/src/tip/pylons/decorators/
> 
>   single file:
>     http://bitbucket.org/bbangert/pylons/src/tip/pylons/decorators/util.py
> 
> Compare with GitHub:
> 
>   file list:
>     http://github.com/djmitche/buildbot
> 
>   in a subdirectory:
>     http://github.com/djmitche/buildbot/tree/master/buildbot/process/
> 
>   single file:
>     http://github.com/djmitche/buildbot/blob/master/buildbot/process/buildstep.py
> 
> I think I like Trac and Bitbucket best.

The thing I don't really like about trac is that the specification of
revision ends up in the query arguments and that just rubs me the wrong
way for some reason.  Probably not badly enough to void the idea
though...

Cheers,
mwh