Re: [RFC 1/4 v2] Implement a basic remote helper for svn in C.

On Thursday 26 July 2012 10:29:51 Junio C Hamano wrote:

Of course, if the dispatch loop has to be rewritten so that a
central dispatcher decides what to call, individual input handlers
do not need to say NOT_HANDLED nor TERMINATE, as the central
dispatcher should keep track of the overall state of the system, and
the usual "0 on success, negative on error" may be sufficient.

One thing I wondered was how an input "capability" (or "list")
should be handled after "import" was issued (hence batch_active
becomes true).  The dispatcher loop in the patch based on
NOT_HANDLED convention will happily call cmd_capabilities(), which
does not have any notion of the batch_active state (because it is a
function scope static inside cmd_import()), and will say "Ah, that
is mine, and let me do my thing."  If we want to diagnose such an
input stream as an error, the dispatch loop needs to become aware of
the overall state of the system _anyway_, so that may be an argument
against the NOT_HANDLED based dispatch system the patch series uses.

That's a good point. The current implementation allows other commands to 
appear during import batches. This shouldn't be possible according to the 
protocol, I think. But it doesn't do harm. Solving it will require a global 
state and go towards a global displatcher.