From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:46:22 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] {fetch,upload}-pack: allow --depth=0 for infinite depth
Message-ID: <20100824174622.GA31283@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vvd6zx63h.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 10:39:46AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:08:24PM +1000, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:
> >
> >> Users can do --depth=2147483648 for infinite depth now. It just looks
> >> ugly. So make "0" special (i.e. infinite depth) at plumbing/protocol
> >> level.
> >
> > What happens if I connect to an older server? Shouldn't "I understand
> > depth=0 is infinite" be a server capability, and we hack around it by
> > sending depth=2^32-1 when we have a modern client but an older server?
> 
> Good point.  Do we also need to find out how wide an int is on the other
> end in that case?

I doubt it. We can probably assume that the remote can handle a signed
32-bit depth (so really, my example should have been 2^31-1). If they
can't, then it would probably be at best an unsigned 16-bit int, in
which case we could only handle a depth of 65535 commits. There are way
more than that in common repositories, so --depth with such an
implementation would be pretty broken already.

-Peff