Re: Git-aware HTTP transport
On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Show 14 quoted lines
> david@lang.hm wrote:
>> except that HTTP cannot transport binary data, if you feed it binary data
>> it then encodes it into 7-bit safe forms for transport.
>
> Total utter bunk. You're thinking of email and news, which had to deal with
> broken legacy code.
>
> HTTP has *always* been binary clean. It does not encode anything into 7-bit
> safe anything. The only "encoding" that it ever does is HTTP/1.1's chunked
> encoding, which is a way to deal with the fact that it might not always know
> the total length of the data before it starts the transfer; it sends the data
> in arbitrary-sized "chunks" prefixed by a byte count. It does this to
> support connection caching in HTTP/1.1; HTTP/1.0 would simply close the
> connection to indicate end of (binary) data.
Ok, I was wrong, thanks to everyone for correcting me. I now know this.
David Lang