Gitarella

I would like to provide a review of the Gitarella software project that aims to deliver a better performing, comprehensive and user-friendly web frontend for Git repositories in comparison to gitweb. The choice of language for this project is Ruby, which simplifies the handling of both CGI and FastCGI through the same piece of code. There are already many libraries available for common tasks, like page templates and diffs handling, which makes the process even easier.

The software's current version has basic repository browsing and file diffing capabilities while using memcached as a backend for short-term storage of extracted data. The project's development is managed via GIT on the git://farraugt.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/gitarella.git URL, with the web interface available on the Gitarella site. The current version, 0.001, is a pre-alpha version that allows the user to browse repositories with a simplistic interface.

Notably, the latest release has tons of bug fixes, notably in how it handles tags, remote (pushed) branches, and commit descriptions. Furthermore, it features graceful handling of exceptions, depending on whether they happen during initialization or requests, ensuring that the user is never presented with an unanswered request. Finally, the ruby-filemagic extension is optional, but recommended, whereas the log4r extension would allow for logging ability.

Overall, Gitarella is proving to be a reliable and useful tool for anyone who works with Git repositories.