Re: Request for detailed documentation of git pack protocol

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: May 14, 2009, 14:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20090514144433.GD30527@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <d411cc4a0905140655y244f21aem44f1e246dd74d80c@mail.gmail.com>

Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
> >
> > Dulwich - off in its own world and not even trying to match basic
> > protocol rules by just watching what happens when you telnet to a
> > git port. ??No clue how that's going to fair.
> 
> Oddly enough, I'm in Dulwich land too. I've been working on a
> Mercurial plugin that will provide a two way lossless bridge for Hg to
> be able to push and pull to/from a Git server.

How are you going to represent an n-way merge in Git in Hg?

> I've fixed some of the
> issues I've found with the client side work and both pushes and pulls
> will work now. (I did turn off 'thin-pack' capability announcement,
> since you're correct that it simply was not properly implemented).

I'm half interested in Dulwich for "repo"[1] but I need the #@!* library to be stable and correctly implement Git conventions. :-)

[1] http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=tools/repo.git;a=summary

> If we're going to round out the list, I've also worked on an
> ActionScript partial implementation, but it never got to the packfile
> level,

ActionScript?  WTF?  As in that thing that embeds in Flash?

> and some of the Erlang guys are interested in writing at least
> a partial Erlang implementation too, which I may get involved in at
> some point.

I heard they moved their official repository to Git. Their VM as a network server is just plain awesome. I half wish I was using that for the Gerrit backend rather than Apache MINA. Erlang is rock-solid and doesn't have major threading bugs in its core.

Oh heck, I just found the documentation for the Erlang sshd. Nice. Sadly it lacks public key support it seems, and a solid Git library with server protocols fully implemented, but, eh, its management is way better than Java.

Show 7 quoted lines

> It seems like if anyone would do what you're asking, it's probably me.
> In the next few weeks, I do what I can to fix up the remainder of the
> Dulwich code as part of my hg-git work.  I'm also working with Shawn
> on the Apress book, where I was going to try to document much of this
> information, perhaps I could try writing an RFC as an appendix or
> something - then that will force him to spend time correcting
> everything I got wrong :)

Hah!

Even if you don't write it for the book, I'll certainly try to give a technical review over the content. That goes for anyone who takes the time to write the protocol out, and has a fair clue as to how it currently works.

-- 
Shawn.