Re: HTTP repo referencing stale heads (can't clone)

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Apr 4, 2006, 07:03 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzmj1aklh.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <20060403180929.GA14967@reactrix.com>

Nick Hengeveld <nickh@reactrix.com> writes:

> Is there any interest in making the HTTP transport slighly less dumb by
> using DAV?

I personally feel PROPFIND is the right way to do "wget -r", and very much welcome a patch to replace objects/info/packs with it when able.

Show 5 quoted lines

> I have a working patch to http-fetch that tries to use PROPFIND to get a
> remote pack list and falls back to using objects/info/packs.  It's
> feasible to do something similar to get a remote ref list when cloning,
> although that's a bit more work as all refs would have to be fetched
> into a local repo and parsed to determine the object type.

Faking info/refs with PROPFIND, if we do not have to peel the onion ^{}, should be relatively cheap operation, and could be done as an enhancement to git-ls-remote.sh. If your faked info/refs file lacks ^{} entries, git-fetch cannot auto-follow tags, but git-clone should work as before.

A clever sysadmins could mod_rewrite requests to info/refs and objects/info/packs with a custom CGI, but then probably they would be running git-daemon ;-).