Re: [PATCH] Trivial support for cloning and fetching via ftp://.

Sasha Khapyorsky [off-list ref] writes:

This adds trivial support for cloning and fetching via ftp://.

Interesting.

I was wondering myself if our use of curl libraries in
http-fetch allows us to do this when I was looking at the
alternates breakage yesterday.

At a few places we do look at http error code that is returned
from the curl library, and change our behaviour based on that.
But it appears the difference between error code from ftp and
http has no bad effect on us.  In an empty repository, we can
run this:

	$ git-http-fetch -a -v heads/merge \
	  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulus/powerpc.git

(of course, this should normally be with http://www.kernel.org).
We notice that we get an error from a request for one object,
and switch to pack & alternates transfer.  The only difference
between http://www and ftp://ftp is that for the former we know
error code 404 and supress the error message but for the latter
we do not treat error 550 from RETR response any specially and
show an error message.  We still fall back to retrieve packs,
hoping that the missing object is in a pack.

I'd take this patch as is, but we might want to add some error
message supression logic just like we do for http.