Supporting Namespaces in cgit

[Daniel Silverstone]

Hello,

One of the projects I am involved with is called Gitano[1] and is a Git server
along the lines of Gitolite or Gitosis, but not along the lines of Gitlab or
Gitorious.  Among various technologies developed by other projects, we
recommend the use of CGit for visualising the Git repositories hosted in a
Gitano instance; and we have been very pleased with CGit in the three or
four years we've been using it.

We have recently been looking at ways to support server-side repository forks
in Gitano and how we might use namespaces to support that.  In addition that
led to us thinking about how we could segregate Gitano's administration refs
into a namespace to keep things cleaner.  However if we were to use server-side
namespaces for that, then we would need to ensure our chosen web visualisation
tool (CGit) was able to deal with it.

An examination of the code (thorough, but admittedly a while ago) failed to
find any support for Git namespaces in CGit, but I wondered firstly if
namespaces had ever been considered for support in CGit?  If not yet
considered, would support for namespaces be something that the CGit project
might entertain?  We would be very prepared to do a first pass set of patches,
or indeed a design document first if that were desirable; but given our
relative inexperience in the CGit codebase we would very much appreciate
pointers and assistance from the CGit community.

Obviously, if namespace support is not something that the CGit community wants
to see done then we will have to rethink some of our backend design decisions.
Similarly, if it's interesting but there is no intention to make a CGit release
within the timeframe we'd be working to (approx. November time at the latest)
then we'll need to think again.

I appreciate this is a fairly content-free mail that seems to be asking so much
and offering very little, so in brief summary:

1. We'd like CGit to support namespaces on a per-repo basis
2. We're prepared to head up the design and/or implementation of this
3. But only if the CGit community thinks this is at least possible to get
   merged into a release the near future (next 6 months or so).

I look forward to your opinions, even if they're in the negative.

Regards,

Daniel.

[1: https://git.gitano.org.uk/gitano.git/ ]

-- 
Daniel Silverstone                         http://www.digital-scurf.org/
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