Re: Corporate firewall braindamage

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Apr 10, 2008, 23:33 UTC
Message-ID: <20080410233328.GQ10274@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v7if5wbdd.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> writes:
> > 3. git protocol encapsulated in HTTP POST transaction
> >
> >    git protocol is already fundamentally a RPC protocol, where the
> >    client sends a query and the server responds.  Furthermore, it
> >    tries to minimize the number of round trips (RPC calls), which is
> >    of course desirable.
> >
> >    Each such RPC transaction could be formulated as an HTTP POST
> >    transaction.
> >
> >    This requires modifications to both the client and the server;
> >    furthermore, the server can no longer rely on the invariant "one TCP
> >    connection == one session"; a proxy might break a single session
> >    into arbitrarily many TCP connections.
> 
> It would probably be a one-CS/EE-student-half-a-summer sized project to
> create such a server-side support with a specialized client.

Funny you say that. This was a GSoC 2008 project idea. We even received an application from a student for it.

The hard part is either making the server side stateful, so it can remember what the last RCP call had said it wants/haves, or doing a stateless protocol where the client uses an exponential expansion (or some such behavior) of its have list until the server replies with the pack data.

-- 
Shawn.