This is a much more substantial critique :) I definitely don't think this is a trivial idea. I did a quick analysis and the naivest possible solution isn't very good: only looking at uncompressed objects requires scanning ~340 MB to deliver the <1 MB answer the question "show me the diffs by user Zhang Yi in file fs/ext4/inode.c on branch master in 2025". The bulk of that is scanning commit objects for commits by Zhang Yi in 2025 (171 MB), then fetching trees to filter those to just fs/ext4/inode.c (159 MB).

But this begs the question, why is cgit scanning 340 MB to answer this question? Is cgit not using good indexes? (Making a space-time tradeoff that doesn't make sense on a public-access website in a post-stupid-AI-scraper world?)