Re: .git/info/refs

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 26, 2007, 21:09 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0701262200131.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <45BA2ED2.7080807@zytor.com>

Hi,

On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> writes:
> > 
> > > For heaven's sake, in computer science we can *NEVER* use the same
> > > feature for *MORE THAN ONE THING*.  If it doesn't work format-wise
> > > that's fine, but "it's only supposed to be used by dumb transports" is
> > > ridiculous.
> > 
> > Hmmmm... I am lost here....
> > 
> 
> Jakub and Johannes seems to have been arguing that "info/refs is for dumb
> transports, therefore it cannot be used for any other purpose."  I find this
> argument utterly bizarre, since in general, in computer science, you try to be
> multipurpose whenever practical.

You keep on harping on that issue. I really get tired of it.

You seem to propose that we should stuff things into .git/info/refs, just because it is already there.

You seem to suggest that computer science is all about breaking things, to muddle waters by mixing things which are clearly different kinds of kettle, to "just" add a small thing here and there, all under the guise of multi-purposity or whatever.

You seem to reason that practicality is more important than good style.

You know, this reasoning brought to us that big crap sh*tpile called Windows. They also thought: it's not a big deal, let's introduce just a little thing here and there, and a direct call from this component to that component cannot hurt, cannit?

I am really, really getting tired of that kind of reasoning.

If you don't see how UNELEGANT it is to force dumb transports to download things MEANT FOR GITWEB, and how much NICER it would be to have a file WHICH IS ONLY MEANT FOR GITWEB TO BEGIN WITH, and which is easily EXTENSIBLE, since we don't have to CARE about DUMB TRANSPORTS, because gitweb data is a PURELY LOCAL thing, while dumb transports are NOT, I will just start to ignore you.

Ciao, Dscho