Re: 2.6.17-rc6-mm2

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Actually, the really irritating thing is that we actually generate all these nice status updates, which just makes pulling and cloning a lot more comfortable, because you actually see what is going on, and what to expect.

Except they only work over ssh, where we have a separate channel (for stderr), and with the native git protocol all that nice status work just gets flushed to /dev/null :(

Dang. It's literally the most irritating part of the thing: the protocol itself is exactly the same whether you go over ssh:// or over git://, but that visual information about what is going on is missing, and it's surprisingly important from a usability standpoint.

Perhaps we shouldn't rely on stderr, and instead have a backchannel as part of the protocol itself.  After all, the protocol already does packetization, so all it needs is a reliable way to pick out the error/status packets; we could even combine that with a machine-readable code (like SMTP et al) that could get interpreted by the other side as needed.

	-hpa