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

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Steven Michalske wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2012, at 4:07 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

>> [...]
>>> diff: Use fifo instead of pipe: Retrieve the name of the pipe from env and open it
>>> for svndump.
>>
>> I'd prefer to avoid this if possible, since it means having to decide
>> where the pipe goes on the filesystem.  Can you summarize the
>> discussion in the commit message so future readers understand why
>> we're doing it?
>
> Crazy thought here but would a socket not be a bad choice here?

Not crazy --- it was already mentioned.  It could probably allow using
--cat-blob-fd even on the platforms that don't inherit file
descriptors >2, though it wuld take some tweaking.  Though I still
think the way forward is to keep using plain pipes internally for now
and to make the bidirectional communication optional, since it
wouldn't close any doors to whatever is most convenient on each
platform.  Hopefully I'll hear more from Florian about this in time.

> Imagine being able to ssh tunnel into the SVN server and run the helper with
> filesystem access to the SVN repo.

We're talking about what communicates between the SVN dump parser the
version control system-specific backend (git fast-import) that reads
the converted result, so that particular socket wouldn't help much.

Jonathan