Artifact d1d8294b0f34f80f1f1ebbad56a9b50371247d75dd54d4593a58b6945af9d6e2:
- File docs/fossil-paths.md — part of check-in [1a0e3e3425] at 2026-09-13 22:16:14 on branch fossil-paths — Resolve relative links in documents against the document, not the page URL (user: dmestas, size: 6397) [annotate] [blame] [check-ins using] [more...]
Fossil paths
Quarry serves repositories that came from fossil, and imported content — wiki pages, forum posts, check-in comments, embedded documents — is full of fossil's own URLs. This is the map from those URLs onto quarry routes, what is deliberately not mapped, and what it would take to map the rest.
Two seams do the work, both in internal/api/register.go:
FossilRoute(repo, path)— the verbs that need no index lookup. Used by the check-in comment renderer and delegated to by the resolver.resolver.ResolvePath(path)— the same table plus the verbs that need the index (/info/<hash>,/wiki?name=). Used by the markup pipeline.
An empty answer from either means quarry has no equivalent, and the caller unwraps the link to plain text. A reader is never handed a link that 404s. That policy is the important one: everything below is about which side of it a verb sits on.
Mapped
| fossil | quarry |
|---|---|
/doc/<version>/<path> |
/r/{repo}/doc/{version}/{path} |
/info/<hash>, /artifact/<hash>, /whatis/<hash> |
/r/{repo}/info/{prefix} |
/timeline |
/r/{repo}/timeline |
/forum, /forumpost/<h>, /forumthread/<h> |
/r/{repo}/forum |
/technote, /event |
/r/{repo}/technote |
/tktview/<id>, /tktview?name=<id> |
/r/{repo}/ticket/{id} |
/wiki?name=<page> |
/r/{repo}/wiki/{name} |
/dir?ci=<v>&name=<d> |
/r/{repo}/tree/{version}/{path} |
/brlist |
/r/{repo}/branch |
/tarball/<v>/…, /zip/<v>/… |
/r/{repo}/archive/{version} |
The forum entries land on the index, not the thread, on purpose: measured against a fossil clone, 303 of 304 cited forum hashes are not present locally, so a deep link would 404.
/tarball and /zip map only when the link names a version. Quarry's
archive route has no "whatever the tip is" spelling, and guessing trunk
would hand a reader a different tree than the link meant.
Relative links inside a document
Not a route question, but the same family of bug. Fossil serves a
document at /doc/<version>/<path>, so the URL's directory is the
document's directory and a relative link in it resolves for free. Quarry
renders the same file on the repository home page and under a tree
listing too, where the page's URL sits somewhere else entirely.
SQLite's README links doc/compile-for-unix.md. Rendered at /r/sqlite
a browser resolved that against /r/ and asked for
/r/doc/compile-for-unix.md — a 404, while the document itself sat at
/r/sqlite/doc/trunk/doc/compile-for-unix.md the whole time.
docResolver now carries the version and directory the document was read
at, and markup.rewriteDocRelative re-bases every relative href and
src onto the doc route. A body that sits at no path — a wiki page, a
forum post, a ticket comment — has no sibling to resolve against, is not
a DocResolver, and keeps its targets literal.
Gated: /finfo
Quarry has this page — /r/{repo}/history/{version}/{path} — and it
is the single commonest fossil verb in imported content (libfossil's wiki
alone carries 500 references). It is still dropped, for one reason:
zit log -n 50 <version> <path> takes 129 seconds on the SQLite
mirror. The same page on quarry's own repository answers in 3.4s. -n
caps the entries named, not the nodes traversed — correct by design,
since capping traversal would make the answer depend on how much
unrelated history sat in between — so a path filter walks the whole
ancestry, and the per-check-in predicate is what costs.
The root cause is in zit, src/cmd/history.zig: the walk builds a
logstore.PlaintextCache and uses it for its own manifest reads
(log.contentCached), but effectivePathContent — called twice per
visited check-in, once for the node and once for its primary parent —
calls repo.fileAt, which takes neither that cache nor a BaselineMemo.
repo.fileAtMemo exists and takes both. Check-in manifests are routinely
stored as deltas against their neighbours, so each call re-resolves the
same base chain, and the cost grows with how much history sits behind the
node rather than with the node.
Two fixes, in order of size:
- Thread the walk's
PlaintextCacheand aBaselineMemothrougheffectivePathContenttofileAtMemo— the memo that#84added for exactly this shape, which this one call site does not take. - Memoize
PathContentby rid. Every check-in's content is computed twice: once as here when it is visited, once as parent when its child is. In a mostly-linear history that is exactly 2× the necessary work.
Pointing 500 imported links at a page that takes two minutes would be
worse than showing the label as text, so /finfo stays dropped until
that lands. TestVerbsWithoutAQuarryPageStayDropped asserts the gate and
is the place to revisit.
Future work
None of these are mapped, and none should be until quarry has the page. Recorded here so the decision is on the record rather than implied by silence.
/uv/<name> — unversioned files
The one with a clear path. Fossil's unversioned files are repository-level blobs that live outside the check-in graph: release binaries, generated downloads, anything that should not be versioned but should be served.
Quarry already has the machinery — the attachment store (RFC 0016), with
owner-supplied S3 behind it and the forge bucket as the default. An
attachment today is keyed to an object (a ticket, a wiki page, a forum
post); an unversioned file is the same thing keyed to the repository.
That is the whole gap: a repository-scoped attachment target, a listing
page, and /uv/<name> maps onto it.
Worth doing when someone mirrors a repository that actually uses them — it is a real fossil feature, and the download links in that repository's own documentation are what break without it.
The rest
| fossil | what quarry would need |
|---|---|
/leaves |
a leaves query on the index; the branch page is close |
/vdiff?from=&to= |
diff between two arbitrary versions; today quarry diffs a check-in against its parent |
/stat, /timewarps |
repository statistics pages |
/help, /md_rules |
forge-level reference pages, not repository ones |
Each is a page first and a route second. Add the page, then add one row
to FossilRoute, then delete its line from this section.