From: david@lang.hm
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:37:04 GMT
Subject: Re: Git-aware HTTP transport
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0808281033070.2713@asgard.lang.hm>
In-Reply-To: <20080828172853.GE21072@spearce.org>

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

> david@lang.hm wrote:
>> On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
>>>> "Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
>>>
>>> Yes, I really did mean for this part of the protocol to be in binary.
>>
>> except that HTTP cannot transport binary data, if you feed it binary data
>> it then encodes it into 7-bit safe forms for transport.
>
> So then how does it transport a GIF file to my browser?  uuencoded?

something like that. it uses the mimetype mechanisms to identify the 
various pieces and encodes each piece (if nothing else it needs to make 
sure that the mimetype seperators don't appear in the data) uuencode is 
one of the available mechanisms.

> Last time I read the RFCs I was pretty certain HTTP is 8-bit clean
> in both directions.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not. to test this yourself find 
a webserver with an image file and retrieve it via telnet (telnet hostname 
80<enter>GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.0<enter><enter>) and what will come back 
will be text.

> Of course this may all be moot.  I think we're moving in a direction
> of matching the git native protocol more exactly.

true, but it's never a waste of time to learn something (whichever one of 
us is right :-)

David Lang