Re: [feature request] resume capability for users in enemies of Internet countries

[Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.email>]

On 07/10/2022 08:26, Eric Wong wrote:
> Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de> wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 08:44:09AM +0700, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
>>> On 10/7/22 01:01, m wrote:
>>>> In my country government make connections unstable on purpose. Please add resume capability for commands like git clone
>>>>
>>> Bandwidth issue?
>>>
>> Bandwidth is one thing but the other thing is that git network
>> operations require that the whole operation succeeds in one go.
>>
>> If your connectivity is bad to the point that the TCP connection breaks
>> you have downloaded a bunch of data that is AFAIK just thrown away when
>> you retry.
>>
>> It is difficult to know if that data would be useful in the future, and
>> you cannot meaningfully 'resume' because the remote state might have
>> changed in the meantine as well.
>>
>> Further, this whole fetch operation is using a heuristic to fetch some
>> data in the hope that it will be enough to reconstruct the history that
>> is requested, and this has been wrong in some cases, too. Not very
>> precise and reproducible hence hard to 'resume' as well.
>>
>> Let's say that the git networking has been developed at and tuned for
>> the 'first world' Internet, and may be problematic to use in net-wise
>> backwater areas. And it would require non-trivial effort to change.
> Increased adoption of bundles would help, since `wget -c' and such
> would work nicely, but that puts the burden on hosts for extra storage.
>
> Perhaps GIT_SMART_HTTP=0 and having dumb clones not throwaway
> incomplete xfers would be more transparent to hosters, but dumb
> HTTP tends to be slow even on good connections.

There is work going on by Stollee (cc'd) on Bundle-URIs that look to
split up repository serving into bite sized chunk, so may be worth
looking at.
https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.1248.v4.git.1660050761.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/
: [PATCH v4 0/2] bundle URIs: design doc

Also discussed at the recent Contributor's Summit
https://lore.kernel.org/git/YzXvwv%2FzK5AjhVvV@nand.local/ : [TOPIC 1/8]
Bundle URIs

--
Philip