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

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Florian Achleitner wrote:

> This is how I see it, probably it's all wrong:
> I thought the main problem is, that we don't want processes to have *more than
> three pipes attached*, i.e. stdout, stdin, stderr, because existing APIs don't
> allow it.

Oh, that makes sense.  Thanks for explaining, and sorry to have been so
dense.

At the Windows API level, Set/GetStdHandle() is only advertised to
handle stdin, stdout, and stderr, so on Windows there would indeed
need to be some magic to communicate the inherited HANDLE value to
fast-import.

But I am confident in the Windows porters, and if a fast-import
interface change ends up being needed, I think we can deal with it
when the moment comes and it wouldn't necessitate changing the remote
helper interface.

You also mentioned before that passing fast-import responses to the
remote helper stdin means that the remote helper has to slurp up the
whole list of refs to import before starting to talk to fast-import.
That was good practice already anyway, but it is a real pitfall and a
real downside to the single-input approach.  Thanks for bringing it
up.

Jonathan