Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
Yes. At GitHub we actually have a custom endpoint which hooks up
"cat-file --batch" with a format of the client's choosing. That's what
(indirectly) feeds things like raw.github.com.
I've been tempted to send it upstream, but it's pretty ugly, and does
give the client a lot of power (for now, the placeholders you can use
with cat-file are not that powerful, but if we start to unify with
ref-filter, etc, then we run into situations like we had with
%(describe) recently). Likewise, the v2 object-info endpoint _could_
accept arbitrary format strings (it's the same idea, just with
--batch-check instead of --batch).
Yeah, the object-info actually was from folks who are interested in
doing something similar, and it would be nice if we can share the
protocol endpoint that is more suitable for interactive tree and
history traversal to help those who want to do virtual filesystem.
Thanks.