Re: Google Code: Support for Mercurial and Analysis of Git and Mercurial

Jakub> Perhaps it is time to restart work on _"smart" HTTP protocol_?

I had put together some ideas for how that could work, but didn’t post them because it looked like smarter http transport was fait accompli.

The general idea was to use an http server as a proxy for git-daemon. Sites running git-daemon could put up such a proxy which will only accept proxy attempts to their own daemon, and sites or users behind restrictive firewalls (or http proxies) could set up such a proxy which requires http-level authentication but then will proxy for any git-daemon.

IIRC, I intended to suggest the name post_proxy for the config files. One could add a post_proxy to a repo (for the former style) or in their global config (for the latter style). Either way, an http_proxy could still be used, if necessary, to access the post_proxy.

Any stream the client would send to a remote git-daemon would be encapsulted and sent via an HTTP POST to the post_proxy, which would use the git protocol to send it to the specified git-daemon. Any reply back from the git-daemon would be sent to the client as the reply to the POST.

The proxy can be readilly written as a CGI, as a mod_lang extension (for one’s favourite lang), as a standalone server, or as an extension to projects such as gitweb or cgit.

I never got past the rough design phase because, when I was preparing to post the idea, it looked like alternate code was already written....

Is there any interest in this?

-JimC