Re: Smart fetch via HTTP?

> Hello,
> 
> Did anyone already think about fetching over HTTP working similarly to the
> native git protocol?
> 
> That is rather than reading the raw content of the repository, there would be
> a CGI script (could be integrated to gitweb), that would negotiate what the
> client needs and then generate and send a single pack with it.
> 
> Mercurial and bzr both have this option. It would IMO have three benefits:
>  - Fast access for people behind paranoid firewalls, that only let http and
>    https (you can tunel anything through, but only to port 443) through.
>  - Can be run on shared machine. If you have web space on machine shared
>    by many people, you can set up your own gitweb, but cannot/are not allowed
>    to start your own network server for git native protocol.
>  - Less things to set up. If you are setting up gitweb anyway, you'd not need
>    to set up additional thing for providing fetch access.
> 
> Than a question is how to implement it. The current protocol is stateful on
> both sides, but the stateless nature of HTTP more or less requires the
> protocol to be stateless on the server.
> 
> I think it would be possible to use basically the same protocol as now, but
> make it stateless for server. That is server first sends it's heads and than
> client repeatedly sends all it's wants and some haves until the server acks
> all of them and sends the pack.
> 
> Alternatively I am thinking about using Bloom filters (somebody came with
> such idea on the bzr list when I still followed it). It might be useful, as
> over HTTP we need to send as many haves as possible in one go.
>