Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jul 7, 2005, 19:04 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507071158220.3293@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vk6k2sfa4.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
>    - X.git/objects/pack can have packed GIT archives.  I
>      envision that this will be a series of 5 to 20 MB packs,
>      occasionally adding a new incremental pack when
>      X.git/objects/??/ directories accumulate enough standalone
>      SHA1 files.  It is not necessary to have X.git/objects/??/
>      files if an object is contained in one of the packs.

Note that I just re-packed the kernel archive on kernel.org, and removed _all_ unpacked files. Once that percolates to the mirrors, the http protocol will be useless without anything like this.

That said, I really think the dumb protocols are useless anyway. No other system supports pure static object pulling anyway, and as far as I'm concerned, I want "rsync" to kind of work (but it won't be optimal, since re-packing will delete all the old objects and replace it with the new pack that is downloaded anew). But plain http? I'm not convinced.

I'd much rather have a "stupid server" that just listens to a port, and basically forks off and executes "git-upload-pack" when it's connected to (perhaps reading the directory name first). Nothing else. Then we can do a security analysis of upload-pack, which should be fairly easy since it's not actually ever _writing_ anything.

At that point, you can do

	git pull git://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/..

and it would just connect to some default "git port", pass off the directory name, and be done with it - exact same discovery protocol that now use for ssh. And "git clone" would also automatically work.

		Linus