From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:43:28 GMT
Subject: Re: Git-aware HTTP transport
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