On Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 01:36:49PM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

quoted

I agree that would be a lot more pleasant for adding protocol features.
But I just worry that the stateful protocols get a lot less efficient.
I'm having trouble coming up with an easy reproduction, but my
recollection is that http has some nasty corner cases, because each
round of "have" lines sent to the server has to summarize the previous
conversation. So you can get a case where the client's requests keep
getting bigger and bigger during the negotiation (and eventually getting
large enough to cause problems).

That's not so much a corner case as just how negotiation works over
http.

Sure. What I meant more was "there are corner cases where it gets out of
control and doesn't work".

I have had to give the advice in the past "if your fetch over http
doesn't work, try it over ssh". If we change the ssh protocol to be
stateless, too, then that closes that escape hatch.

I haven't had to give that advice for a while, though. Maybe tweaks to
the parameters or just larger buffers have made the problem go away over
the years?

We want to do better (e.g. see [1]) but that's a bigger change than
the initial protocol v2.

As Brandon explained it to me, we really do want to use stateless-rpc
semantics by default, since that's just better for maintainability.
Instead of having two protocols, one that is sane and one that
struggles to hoist that into stateless-rpc, there would be one
stateless baseline plus capabilities to make use of state.

Yes, I think that would be a nice end-game. It just wasn't clear to me
where we'd be in the interim.

-Peff