Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12

From: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Date: Jul 7, 2005, 21:29 UTC
Message-ID: <m1vf3muwxw.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507071158220.3293@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> That said, I really think the dumb protocols are useless anyway. No other 
> system supports pure static object pulling anyway, and as far as I'm 
> concerned, I want "rsync" to kind of work (but it won't be optimal, since 
> re-packing will delete all the old objects and replace it with the new 
> pack that is downloaded anew). But plain http? I'm not convinced.

Have you not looked at tla/arch? tla does supports dumb servers. It's job is a little easier as it has one file per atomic commit I suspect once packs start working well that should not be an issue for git either.

For small projects this is a major benefit, as they can just push their files to a convenient http or ftp server.

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> I'd much rather have a "stupid server" that just listens to a port, and
> basically forks off and executes "git-upload-pack" when it's connected to
> (perhaps reading the directory name first).  Nothing else. Then we can do 
> a security analysis of upload-pack, which should be fairly easy since it's 
> not actually ever _writing_ anything.
>
> At that point, you can do
>
> 	git pull git://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/..
>
> and it would just connect to some default "git port", pass off the 
> directory name, and be done with it - exact same discovery protocol that 
> now use for ssh. And "git clone" would also automatically work.

For optimizing network bandwidth that sounds like the way to go. For adhoc development I don't know. For a central sever you still need an authenticated way to push content, which makes it another dimension of the problem. So it is mostly a question of what is the sanest way to mirror/publish data. http is used a lot for publishing data and practically everyone has access to a http server that can host content, so I think supporting http makes git a lot more accessible to people. The only thing more accessible seems to be email, and email is terrible for publish small projects.

Eric