Re: [RFC 4/4] Add cat-blob report pipe from fast-import to remote-helper.

On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 10:51:32AM +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote:

quoted

Note that preexec_cb does not work at all on Windows, as it assumes a

[... a very nice explanation of the pipe issues ...]

IOW: Everything that uses --cat-blob-fd or a similar facility cannot work
on Windows without considerable additional effort.

Thanks, Johannes, that makes sense to me.

Florian, does that mean that making the svn helper start to use
--cat-blob-fd at all is a potential regression for Windows?  The
fast-import documentation says that the cat-blob output will go to
stdout now. Does it even work at all now? I don't really know or
understand all of the reasons for cat-blob-fd to exist in the first
place.

I expect one answer might be "well, the svn remote helper does not work
at all on Windows already, so there's no regression". But this affects
_all_ fast-import calls that git's transport-helper makes. Are there
other ones that use import, and would they be affected by this? 

For that matter, isn't this a backwards-incompatible change for other
third-party helpers? Won't they need to respect the new
GIT_REPORT_FILENO environment variable? Do we need the helper to specify
"yes, I am ready to handle cat-blob-fd" in its capabilities list?

-Peff