Re: [ANNOUNCE] Cogito-0.12

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

   - X.git/objects/pack can have packed GIT archives.  I
     envision that this will be a series of 5 to 20 MB packs,
     occasionally adding a new incremental pack when
     X.git/objects/??/ directories accumulate enough standalone
     SHA1 files.  It is not necessary to have X.git/objects/??/
     files if an object is contained in one of the packs.

Note that I just re-packed the kernel archive on kernel.org, and removed 
_all_ unpacked files. Once that percolates to the mirrors, the http 
protocol will be useless without anything like this.

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.

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.

		Linus