Re: Git dumb HTTP protocol should work without update-server-info

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 8, 2025, 00:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20250908000543.GB1281511@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAGiEHCtP29bQRsEyLabNrLuiP96P-o7EEGi88B7pJbP0tfprxw@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Sep 07, 2025 at 01:24:13PM +0200, Milan Hauth wrote:

> expected:
> dumb http remotes should behave like file remotes

File remotes are running a local git-upload-pack to act as the server. A dumb http remote can't run anything on the server side. So we are stuck pretending that the http endpoint is a filesystem. Besides performing terribly, as brian noted it is not even portable to do, since there is no readdir() equivalent (and things like httpdirfs have to resort to scraping auto-generated directory listings).

If you want to go that route, I think you're better off using a fuse wrapper and just letting Git work against the mounted filesystem, as you tried here:

> as another workaround
> i tried to mount the .git/ directory with httpdirfs
> but httpdirfs fails to mount git repos, see
> https://github.com/fangfufu/httpdirfs/issues/183

I think this does work. The instructions you gave there won't do it, though, because python's http.server module doesn't support range requests.

Something like:

  sudo apt install python3-rangehttpserver
  (cd /path/to/repo && python -m RangeHTTPServer)
  mkdir mnt
  sudo httpdirfs http://localhost:8000/.git mnt

got me a mount that worked with:

  # you could probably avoid sudo here with better mount perms above
  sudo git clone mnt foo

It's painfully slow, though.

Possibly dumb-http could learn to do the same scraping that httpdirfs does to get the refs and pack listings (though this might be quite slow for unpacked refs, if the ref tree is deep). But I doubt you will find anybody that enthused about working on or reviewing dumb-http patches these days. The code is not very well maintained, IMO.

-Peff