From: david@lang.hm
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:12:13 GMT
Subject: Re: Git-aware HTTP transport
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0808281111310.2713@asgard.lang.hm>
In-Reply-To: <48B6E3C0.4010608@zytor.com>

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> 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