Re: [PATCH 0/2] Support for packs in HTTP

> 
> 
> On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > 
> > > Well, regardless, we want to be able to specify which directory to write 
> > > them to. We don't necessarily want to write them to the current working 
> > > directory, nor do we want to write them to their eventual destination in 
> > > .git/objects/pack.
> > > 
> > > In fact, the main current user ("git repack") really wants to write them 
> > > to a temporary file, and one that isn't even called "pack-xxx", since it 
> > > ends up doing cleanup with 
> > > 
> > > 	rm -f .tmp-pack-*
> > > 
> > > in case a previous re-pack was interrupted (in which case it simply cannor
> > > know what the exact name was supposed to be).
> > > 
> > > So the "basename" ends up being necessary and meaningful regardless. We do 
> > > _not_ want to remove that capability.
> > 
> > Shouldn't we do the same thing we do with object files? I don't see any
> > difference in desired behavior.
> 
> Well, the main difference is that pack-files can be used for many things.
> 
> For example, a web interface for getting a pack-file between two releases: 
> say you knew you had version xyzzy, and you want to get version xyzzy+1, 
> you could do that through webgit some way even with a "stupid" interface. 
> Kay already had some patch to generate pack-files for something.
> 
> The point being that pack-files are _not_ like objects. Pack-files are 
> meant for communication. Having them in .git/objects/pack is just one 
> special case.

> > Why not checksum it in a predictable order, either that of the pack file
> > or the index? We do care that it's something verifiable, so that people
> > can't cause intentional collisions (for a DoS) just by naming their packs
> > after existing packs that users might not have downloaded yet.
> 
> We could sha1-sum the "sorted by SHA1" list, I guess.