Adjust GitLab URLs for routing changes #579

Closed mplanchard closed 1 year ago

GitLab has been slowly rolling out a change to their URLs to improve routing performance: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/214217

The gist is that they are putting dashes after the project name and any subgroup(s), so that they can avoid DB lookups in order to handle routing.

Recently, the old URL format stopped resolving at least for issues, commits, and merge requests, see for example:

The result is that actions like forge-browse-issue or forge-browse-pullreq are broken for GitLab.

This commit updates the URL templates for GitLab to use the new, dashed format.

Note that they're discussing reverting the breakage here by leaving in place a redirect for non-dashed URLs, but the new dashed format will still be the canonical, preferred form (and should resolve more quickly, since they don't need to do the extra redirect and/or extra DB work).

So they realized that the removal of the redirect would causes a lot of third-party tooling to break and they reverted the change. It there only was https://gitlab.com, then I would adjust the urls to the preferred format now, but I suspect doing that would cause the same kind of breakage for other users of Forge -- those that use some corporate instance that is outdated or hasn't had the format updated yet.

Seems best to just leave things as they are for another few months at least.

It seems like the dashed format has been a thing for a long time and just poorly communicated: you can see here that most of the work was done ~3 years ago, e.g. work for the issues route here. There probably are legacy gitlab enterprise instances out there though, of course, that are are more than 3 years out of date. Doesn't matter to me as long as everything's working again! Will close this PR.

Yeah, waiting "a few months" probably would not be enough.

magit / forge

Adjust GitLab URLs for routing changes #579