Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] Git remote helpers to implement smart transports.

From: Sverre Rabbelier <srabbelier@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 2, 2009, 18:06 UTC
Message-ID: <fabb9a1e0912021006x2905578bo16dbcaedc0d97bc6@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0912021832480.4985@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

Heya,

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 18:39, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> This is definitely a good direction, and it would be even better if the
> absence of the remote helper was also handled gracefully.

Yes, that is definitely an improvement we can and should make regardless of how we handle http(s) and ftp(s), since currently "git clone nonsense::http://...." will error out with the message that "git-remote-nonsense" cannot be found.

> Of course, I never understood why the backend should know the
> implementation detail that it is based on cURL, so it would be even more
> modular (at least by my definition) if there was no hard-coded mapping.

Agreed.

> Sverre -- Cc'ed -- seemed to like URLs of the form "svn::http://..." and
> "cvs::pserver..." to trigger looking for a remote helper explicitely.  I
> find the compiled-in mapping rather limiting.

Yes, I do think the double-colon syntax is very nice. That is, someone who sees "git clone svn::http://" is likely to understand that it is a svn repo over http that git treats specially.

However, I am not convinced that we should do any magic to map "foo://" to git-remote-foo. On the other hand, I do think it makes sense to have something modular that allows "git-remote-http" to be implemented as a separate package that can be installed.

Perhaps instead of the current special case where "git-remote-curl" is invoked, it would make more sense to instead special case on "http://" (etc) and invoke "git-remote-http" in that case. So "git clone svn://" would not work, but "git clone svn::svn://" would (as is the case now), as well as "git clone http://" being handled by "git-remote-http".

-- 
Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier