Re: git push over http is very dangerous

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 16, 2007, 19:38 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704161212140.5473@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <462394AC.303@beronet.com>

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Christian wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> We have moved from CVS to git in the beginning of last week, all went well
> until this weekend. This weekend one developer wanted to push some of his
> local modifications, unfortunately during the push his http connection seemed
> to have broken or so. Unfortunately git does not prove if the push went well.
> Therefore our repository was broken this morning.

I have to agree: pushing over http really is dangerous. It's not *supposed* to be (it tries to update the refs only after it has uploaded all objects), but it fundamentally cannot do all the validity tests that the "real" git transfer processes do on the receiving side.

And I think git-http-push is pretty fundamentally broken anyway. It doesn't really seem to check for errors. So it doesn't do some of the checks it *could* do.

I would strongly suggest against http pushing (I'd suggest against pulling too, but at least you can't screw up too badly by just reading ;)

I'd also love it if somebody were to actually look into making http-pushing a bit safer. It really needs somebody who cares about it, or it should likely just be disabled entirely (perhaps with a config option that you have to enable to get it - so that people *realize* that it's not maintained and not really supported).

		Linus