Re: Git-aware HTTP transport
- From
- H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
- Date
- Aug 28, 2008, 17:43 UTC
- Message-ID
- <48B6E3C0.4010608@zytor.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <alpine.DEB.1.10.0808281023200.2713@asgard.lang.hm>
david@lang.hm wrote:
> except that HTTP cannot transport binary data, if you feed it binary > data it then encodes it into 7-bit safe forms for transport.
Total utter bunk. You're thinking of email and news, which had to deal with broken legacy code.
HTTP has *always* been binary clean. It does not encode anything into 7-bit safe anything. The only "encoding" that it ever does is HTTP/1.1's chunked encoding, which is a way to deal with the fact that it might not always know the total length of the data before it starts the transfer; it sends the data in arbitrary-sized "chunks" prefixed by a byte count. It does this to support connection caching in HTTP/1.1; HTTP/1.0 would simply close the connection to indicate end of (binary) data.
-hpa