Re: .git/info/refs

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 24, 2007, 16:52 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0701241746390.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <45B78C55.2030204@zytor.com>

Hi,

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > Granted, for some things this might work. However, I would not wreak 
> > havoc by changing the format of .git/info/refs, rather put the details 
> > you wanted into .git/info/refs-details.
> > 
> 
> It's not clear to me if it would be wrecking havoc.  After all, if a 
> format can't be expanded *at all*, there is something wrong, and adding 
> things to the end of a line is a common structured way of expansion. 
> Hence the original query

The idea of .git/info/refs is to enable dumb transports to fetch something akin to intelligently. They don't need that information, and frankly, I don't think they should need to understand it.

I also expect that they interpret everything after the sha1 as refname, what with our having become quite liberal with refnames (they can contain spaces, tabs, and even a small amount of special K). So I don't see a way to upgrade the file format.

But as should be clear by now, I'd prefer additional information -- that is of no interest to dumb transports anyway -- to be put in an own file.

That also opens the possibility of, say .git/info/perl/, which contains _only_ serialized perl objects! I imagine this could be a performance booster.

Show 9 quoted lines

> > However, for other things (like showing a certain number of commits), 
> > it _might_ make sense to cache them (e.g. when literally thousands of 
> > people look at the 100 last commits of linux-2.6.git), but not for 
> > others (e.g. the 100th last to the 200th last commit of 
> > git-tools.git).
> 
> Any query that's within a repository is fairly easily cachable 
> post-generation.  The front page (and its RSS variant) is a bit of an 
> exception, because it involves all repositories at once.

... and here we have a problem, right? No single update hook can update the _whole_ information.

Ciao, Dscho