Re: [RFC PATCH v2 07/16] remote-helpers: Fetch more than one ref in a batch

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Some network protocols (e.g. native git://) are able to fetch more
than one ref at a time and reduce the overall transfer cost by
combining the requests into a single exchange.  Instead of feeding
each fetch request one at a time to the helper, feed all of them
at once so the helper can decide whether or not it should batch them.

Because 'fetch' was already released in 1.6.5 we introduce the new
fetch-multiple capability/command to signal that the helper wants
to use batch oriented approach to fetching refs.

In 1.6.5, there's no way to call a helper other than git-remote-curl, and 
no way to call git-remote-curl unless 1.6.5 was built with it. So I think 
the protocol is not set in stone quite yet. It's documentated for being an 
API, and it's supposed to be that, but it's not quite there in this 
version.

I think it should be generally a good idea to have a start signal and an 
end signal for a block of fetches (and, with the foreign stuff, it would 
be useful to have transport-helper tell the helper process when it was 
done making requests, so the helper process could tell the gfi process to 
exit and stop consuming the helper process's output). At worst, if the 
helper doesn't care, it can just ignore this information.

	-Daniel
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