Expanding it might be a good idea. Though you should probably rethink the tool and do things differently.
When you wrote that we discussed Git's built in `git archive` which can create a tarball of an arbitrary repo. But besides that what we didn't think of was Gitweb. Which already has snapshot capabilities. The hourly snapshot tool doesn't really serve much purpose: - Gitweb HEAD snapshots are always completely up to date while the snapshot lags by an hour - Gitweb can give snapshots of every branch in the repo so the hourly snapshot doesn't add anything there - Gitweb can give snapshots of every repo instead of just core. So we already essentially have snapshots of extensions built into Gitweb while the hourly tool only does core. - Gitweb can make a snapshot of any commit, not just the latest commit
So the only thing that a tool really has to offer is a clean UI and some information like the checksum. Those are probably what we should focus on.
- Drop the notion of hourly snapshots; Either use Gitweb snapshot links directly or package snapshots dynamically when a new one is requested. - Support getting snapshots from old commits in the repo. - Consider expanding the tool to support other repos.
Because this will basically be a UI we shouldn't be half-hearted about the UI. The tool is pointless if we don't go all the way. Don't leave 'Branches' out in the open like that. This is a user tool rather than a Git tool. So instead of listing things like "master" and "REL1_19" use a mapping to give them proper labels like "Development" or "Alpha" and "MediaWiki 1.19.x". Also cleanly group things together. ie: Take all the REL#_## branches and put them in a "Release snapshots" group. wmf/ in "WMF branch snapshots". And things like Wikidata and iwtransclusion in a "Experimental project snapshots" group. Also drop the select field and instead make it a list of links that users can actually see.
I wonder if we should turn this into a special page on MW.org.