Re: 1.5.6.5 fails to clone git.kernel.org/[...]/rostedt/linux-2.6-rt

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 14, 2009, 23:10 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901142357360.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vpriw26uo.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hi,

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> I think we lost the alternate object store support when git-fetch was 
> rewritten from the original shell script (that did support fetching from 
> such a repository over rsync:// transport) to a reimplementation in C, 
> with commit b888d61 (Make fetch a builtin, 2007-09-10).
> 
> Later, cd547b4 (fetch/push: readd rsync support, 2007-10-01) attempted to
> resurrect some rsync support (b888d61 lost rsync support completely for
> git-fetch), but introduced these lines in transport.c:
> 
> 	/* NEEDSWORK: handle one level of alternates */
> 	result = run_command(&rsync);

Indeed... And I know who's responsible for those lines.

However, I am swamped with work these days, and my Git time budget was _way_ overspent what with the recent patches.

So whoever would like to give it a go, go wild.

This is actually a very fine opportunity for people to get involved who always wanted to; it is a relatively low-hanging fruit.

It should just be a matter of getting objects/info/alternates (one can easily reuse a large part of the args[] array filled before the quoted code) into a temporary file.

If that does not succeed, return 0, otherwise fetch those objects, too (again reusing most of the args[] array).

It is that easy because objects as well as packs are immutable, so we can just build the union of objects/packs from the remote and its alternate.

Then all which is left to do is to add a test case to t/t5510-fetch.sh, and you're set.

As there are already test cases for rsync:// in it, it should be as simple as putting an empty file into a newly created directory, create an alternate for the "remote" pointing to the directory, fetching, and testing that the empty file was copied.

That's possible because rsync:// is dumb and does not verify the files it copied.

Oh, and don't forget to remove the NEEDSWORK comment :-)

And now I'm curious who's up for it...

Ciao, Dscho