From: Kevin Smith <yarcs@qualitycode.com>
Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2005 01:54:56 GMT
Subject: Dumb servers (was: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12)
Message-ID: <42CDDCF0.9020906@qualitycode.com>
In-Reply-To: <m1vf3muwxw.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>That said, I really think the dumb protocols are useless anyway. No other 
>>system supports pure static object pulling anyway, and as far as I'm 
>>concerned, I want "rsync" to kind of work (but it won't be optimal, since 
>>re-packing will delete all the old objects and replace it with the new 
>>pack that is downloaded anew). But plain http? I'm not convinced.
> 
> 
> Have you not looked at tla/arch? tla does supports dumb servers.
> It's job is a little easier as it has one file per atomic commit
> I suspect once packs start working well that should not be an
> issue for git either.

In addition to GNU arch/tla, it it also supported by baz, ArX, darcs, 
and mercurial.

> For small projects this is a major benefit, as they can just push
> their files to a convenient http or ftp server.

Absolutely. For the kernel it might not make sense, but I view it as a 
really important feature for tiny projects around the world. Even a CGI 
requirement makes it impossible to serve a project from free or really 
cheap web hosts. Plain HTTP is the only protocol available to people who 
have no extra money to spend on hosting accounts.

This happens to be a hot button issue for me, in case you can't tell. 
Sorry if I'm ranting.

Kevin