The revision_get_by endpoint of the storage API is a pretty intricate piece of code, which joins across five tables (origin_visit -> snapshot -> snapshot_branches -> snapshot_branch -> revision) and doesn't handle edge cases very well (for instance, it won't return anything if that branch points to anything other than a revision).

The only view that uses this function is https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/origin/

It'd be less error-prone to do the lookup on the client side in two or three steps:

• look up the visit by timestamp, get a snapshot id; return an error if there was no such visit
• look up the branch pointer from the snapshot id, return a *typed* target
• look up the typed object and return that to the caller (or have the caller do the indirection themselves)

This is potentially related to T1207 as the second item in that list could use the same storage endpoint.