Why are artifacts not linked across projects in Subversion commits?

When a user makes a Subversion commit and the commit message references a Project Tracker artifact, a link to the artifact is available on the page when viewing the commit in ViewVC. However, if the referenced artifact is in a different project from the commit, this ViewVC link is not available.

This behavior is by design. Project Tracker artifact IDs are only unique within the project. The ViewVC link becomes active only if the artifact(id) resides within the same project as the Subversion commit that references it.

If this limitation was not in place, the algorithm that creates the ViewVC link from a 'match', might incorrectly match on anything with 1-4 letters followed by numbers, including such common items as variable names ("file1", "dir2",...), common standards and surrounding topics ("html4", "rfc2312",...) etc.

To avoid such situations, CollabNet designed CEE such that Helm provides the tracker prefix in use for the project to ViewVC, and that prefix is then used to perform the matching that creates (or does not create) the ViewVC link to the artifact referenced in the commit message.