Re: Git transfer protocols (was: Re: Git-commits mailing list feed)

[Jan Harkes <jaharkes@cs.cmu.edu>]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 02:28:59PM -0700, Mike Taht wrote:
> Jan Harkes wrote:
> 
> >rsync works fine for now, but people are already looking at implementing
> >smarter (more efficient) ways to synchronize git repositories by
> >grabbing missing commits, and from there fetching any missing tree and
> >file blobs. However there is no such linkage to discover missing tag
> >objects, only a full rsync would be able to get them and for that it has
> >to send the name of every object in the repository to the other side to
> >check for any missing ones.

Actually I just realized that I personally probably wouldn't care about
most of the tags that people might add to their trees. Maybe once in a
while, but the tag would probably be obtained through email or the web.

> I think that one reason why rsync is inefficient for git is that it 
...
> lastly, Monotone has it's own "netsync" protocol
> (via http://www.venge.net/monotone/faq.html)

Interesting, probably something like any of these might end up useful to
replace rsync for mirroring full git repositories.

I'm actually more selfish than that and am thinking on how I expect to
use git.

See, I don't care about most of the objects in the repository. In
practice I would probably pull only the latest 'head' once in a while
look for missing commits to give me a quick overview of what has
changed. Then if a diff between the new head and my current tree shows
that anything might have changed in an area I actually do care about,
such as the VFS, I'd want something that does a quick binary search to
identify the commits where the changes occured. But for that I only
need to look at a limited number of tree objects.

As long as I know that someone, somewhere is archiving the whole
repository I can always come back later and fill in the blanks.

HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections and some request interleaving is
probably the fastest and most server friendly way to grab those objects
I really care about.

Jan