Re: HTTP repo referencing stale heads (can't clone)

Nick Hengeveld [off-list ref] writes:

Is there any interest in making the HTTP transport slighly less dumb by
using DAV?

I personally feel PROPFIND is the right way to do "wget -r", and
very much welcome a patch to replace objects/info/packs with it
when able.

I have a working patch to http-fetch that tries to use PROPFIND to get a
remote pack list and falls back to using objects/info/packs.  It's
feasible to do something similar to get a remote ref list when cloning,
although that's a bit more work as all refs would have to be fetched
into a local repo and parsed to determine the object type.

Faking info/refs with PROPFIND, if we do not have to peel the
onion ^{}, should be relatively cheap operation, and could be
done as an enhancement to git-ls-remote.sh.  If your faked
info/refs file lacks ^{} entries, git-fetch cannot auto-follow
tags, but git-clone should work as before.

A clever sysadmins could mod_rewrite requests to info/refs and
objects/info/packs with a custom CGI, but then probably they
would be running git-daemon ;-).