Re: 2.6.17-rc6-mm2

From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Jun 16, 2006, 20:56 UTC
Message-ID: <44931AFD.4070809@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0606152335130.5498@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> 
> Actually, the really irritating thing is that we actually generate all 
> these nice status updates, which just makes pulling and cloning a lot more 
> comfortable, because you actually see what is going on, and what to 
> expect. 
> 
> Except they only work over ssh, where we have a separate channel (for 
> stderr), and with the native git protocol all that nice status work just 
> gets flushed to /dev/null :(
> 
> Dang. It's literally the most irritating part of the thing: the protocol 
> itself is exactly the same whether you go over ssh:// or over git://, but 
> that visual information about what is going on is missing, and it's 
> surprisingly important from a usability standpoint.
>

Perhaps we shouldn't rely on stderr, and instead have a backchannel as part of the protocol itself. After all, the protocol already does packetization, so all it needs is a reliable way to pick out the error/status packets; we could even combine that with a machine-readable code (like SMTP et al) that could get interpreted by the other side as needed.

	-hpa