threads / discuss / 25820

disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

Subject: disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

## tl;dr

5 messages between Nov 23, 2010 and Nov 23, 2010.

replies: 4people: 3as markdown or json

Sitaram Chamarty· Nov 23, 2010, 15:40 UTC · lore

Hello,

Although smart http worked fine for me out of the box, following "man git-http-backend", I've found folks on #git for whom it seems to fail on doing a PROPFIND (found by setting GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1). Enabling WebDAV also doesn't seem to help, although that is quite likely to be some nuance in the Apache config I suppose.

The thing is, I *think* that PROPFIND is not, strictly speaking, needed when you use the smart HTTP mode. If that is indeed true, can we stop git from even attempting it, and so avoid the need to setup WebDAV on Apache?

Would be a great help for many installations.

Thanks,

-- Sitaram

Ilari Liusvaara· Nov 23, 2010, 16:10 UTC · re: Sitaram Chamarty · lore

Re: disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 09:10:43PM +0530, Sitaram Chamarty wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Hello,
> 
> Although smart http worked fine for me out of the box, following "man
> git-http-backend", I've found folks on #git for whom it seems to fail
> on doing a PROPFIND (found by setting GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1).  Enabling
> WebDAV also doesn't seem to help, although that is quite likely to be
> some nuance in the Apache config I suppose.
> 
> The thing is, I *think* that PROPFIND is not, strictly speaking,
> needed when you use the smart HTTP mode.  If that is indeed true, can
> we stop git from even attempting it, and so avoid the need to setup
> WebDAV on Apache?

I thought that this is quite strange, and as consequence, decided to dig a bit.

This is pretty telling:

$ git grep -i --files-with-matches "propfind" http-push.c

http-push.c is AFAIK not used by smart HTTP, only by dumb HTTP push.

Apparently pusher is falling back to dumb WebDAV push for some reason. And then failing because server does not support it or isn't configured apporiately for it.

-Ilari

Scott Chacon· Nov 23, 2010, 17:31 UTC · re: Ilari Liusvaara · lore

Re: disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

Hey,

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Ilari Liusvaara <ilari.liusvaara@elisanet.fi> wrote:

> Apparently pusher is falling back to dumb WebDAV push for some
> reason. And then failing because server does not support it
> or isn't configured apporiately for it.

Yes, the client will fall back to 'dumb' HTTP stuff if the server does not respond properly to the initial /info/refs GET call. I believe it's something like if the client asks for

/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack

and the server does not respond with the first line being:

# service=git-upload-pack

or the Content-Type header being:

application/x-git-upload-pack-advertisement

I believe either of those being absent will cause the client to think that it's not a smart server, so it falls back to the DAV based push. If you let us know what the curl output before that point was, or what your apache config looks like, we might be able to help figure out what's wrong with the server.

I got these DAV fallbacks all the time when my proxy wasn't letting the /info/refs calls through to Apache properly.

Scott

Sitaram Chamarty· Nov 23, 2010, 19:40 UTC · re: Scott Chacon · lore

Re: disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 27 quoted lines

> Hey,
>
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Ilari Liusvaara
> <ilari.liusvaara@elisanet.fi> wrote:
>> Apparently pusher is falling back to dumb WebDAV push for some
>> reason. And then failing because server does not support it
>> or isn't configured apporiately for it.
>
> Yes, the client will fall back to 'dumb' HTTP stuff if the server does
> not respond properly to the initial /info/refs GET call.  I believe
> it's something like if the client asks for
>
> /info/refs?service=git-upload-pack
>
> and the server does not respond with the first line being:
>
> # service=git-upload-pack
>
> or the Content-Type header being:
>
> application/x-git-upload-pack-advertisement
>
> I believe either of those being absent will cause the client to think
> that it's not a smart server, so it falls back to the DAV based push.
> If you let us know what the curl output before that point was, or what
> your apache config looks like, we might be able to help figure out
> what's wrong with the server.

Well it was someone else, but the pastie he has sent was http://pastebin.com/eaB0G1gx -- which may or may not help, because it doesn't seem to show the response *body*, only the headers.

If that doesn't help I'll try and reproduce the problem myself first.

Thanks,

Sitaram

Scott Chacon· Nov 23, 2010, 19:50 UTC · re: Sitaram Chamarty · lore

Re: disabling PROPFIND when using smart http

Hey,

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:40 AM, Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> Well it was someone else, but the pastie he has sent was
> http://pastebin.com/eaB0G1gx -- which may or may not help, because it
> doesn't seem to show the response *body*, only the headers.
>
> If that doesn't help I'll try and reproduce the problem myself first.

Still, it's enough. The request is obviously not getting back to the Git CGI for some reason. There are a number of headers that should have been returned after the first authed GET to /info/refs (lines 35-42 have the servers response). It should have:

< Content-Type: application/x-git-receive-pack-advertisement < Pragma: no-cache < Cache-Control: no-cache, max-age=0, must-revalidate

The Git CGI will set all of those. Since it's not, and it's setting things like ETags, it's not the Git CGI you're communicating with. Check the apache logs and see why it's not routing the request to the cgi.

Scott