I'm only just starting on reading O'Reilly's "RESTful Web Services" (Richardson & Ruby), and I've but skimmed the Felding dissertation, but the URI doesn't strike me as particularly RESTful.

In particular, custom verbs are embedded within the querystring (a=blob, a=blob_plain, a=history, a=tree, etc.) rather than relying solely on HTTP verbs and varying the base URI.

And that base URI never changes: it's always http://git.kernel.org/, regardless of what resource is being requested.

If I can't determine what resource I'm requesting from the base URI alone, how can it still be considered RESTful and not an RPC-style or hybrid architecture?