From: Junio C Hamano Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:39:45 GMT Subject: Re: What's up with the GIT archive on www.kernel.org? Message-ID: <7virx7njxa.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds writes: > Btw, there's no reason why a client-side thing couldn't just parse the > "alternates" thing, and if it doesn't find the objects in the main object > directory, go and fetch them from the alternates itself. There is. For kernel.org, you could say '/pub/scm/blah' in your alternates and expect it to work, only because http://kernel.org/pub hierarchy happens to match the absolute path /pub on the filesystem, but for most people's default HTTP server installation, they would need to say /var/www/scm/blah to have alternate work locally, but somebody has to know that the named directory is served as http://machine.xz/pub/scm/blah somewhere. Client side smarts need some help from the user here to know that '/var/www/scm/blah' read off of objects/info/alternates match that URL.