From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:46:28 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add builtin dump command, to query a repository using a pipe.
Message-ID: <7vr6g4zzpn.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vve5hyln3.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Another thing.

As currently written, the "dump" server is strictly one-request, 
one-response interface.

I can easily see the command set to be extended to allow
transfer of richer set of data (e.g. whether a ref is a symref
and if so where it points at, querying config variables).  Also,
if you want to write a repository browser using this "dump"
server, you would first throw a commit at it, learn its parents
and its tree, and then you suddenly have _many_ objects that you
can simultaneously ask about without doing one-request,
one-response exchange.

So it might make sense to base this not on line-per-line message
format using strbuf_getline() interface, but base it instead on
packet_read_line()/packet_write() interface, and explicitly mark
the end of a batch of request with packet_flush().  That would
allow the "protocol" stream, which would matter even more when
you run this over the network, perhaps via git-daemon and/or
from connect.c