Re: Smart fetch via HTTP?

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: May 17, 2007, 13:10 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90705170610mf9c9b0eu7b40af709469a601@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpq8xbnlmdv.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On 5/17/07, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@imag.fr> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> FYI, bzr uses HTTP range requests, and the introduction of this
> feature lead to significant performance improvement for them (bzr is
> more dumb-protocol oriented than git is, so that's really important
> there). They have this "index file+data file" system too, so you
> download the full index file, and then send an HTTP range request to
> get only the relevant parts of the data file.

That's the kind of thing I was imagining. Between the index and an additional "index-supplement-for-dumb-protocols" maintained by update-server-info, http ranges can be bent to our evil purposes.

Of course it won't be as network-efficient as the git proto, or even as the git-over-cgi proto, but it'll surely be server-cpu-and-memory efficient. And people will benefit from it without having to do any additional setup.

It might be hard to come up with a usable approach to http ranges. But I do think it's worth considering carefully.

cheers,