Re: [GSoC23] Working on project Idea from SOC 2011

[Khalid Masum <khalid.masum.92@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 8:26 PM Derrick Stolee <derrickstolee@github.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/9/23 7:07 AM, Khalid Masum wrote:
> > There is this SOC 2011 idea named "Resumable clone" here:
> >
> > https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SoC2011Ideas.html
> >
> > ...
> > Currently cloning a remote repository has to be done in one session.
> > If the process fails or is aborted for any reason any already downloaded
> > data is lost and one has to start from scratch.
>
> > Goal: Allow Git to resume a cloning process that
> > has been aborted for any reason.
> > Languages: C
>
> "for any reason" is going to be pretty difficult.
>
> One direction that is relatively new in the Git project
> (much newer than that project idea) is the bundle URI
> standard, allowed by "git clone --bundle-uri=<X>". It
> helps bootstrap clones by fetching bundle files and using
> them to populate the object directory before finishing
> the clone with an incremental fetch to the origin server.
>
> Since the bundles are expected to be precomputed files,
> it is much easier to use standard HTTP range queries to
> download only the "missing" portion of the file from the
> bundle server.
>
> I think one thing that would need to change on the Git
> client is the location of the temporary file being used
> to store the bundle as it is downloaded. It currently
> uses a random name, but if the name was a hash of the
> URL, then it would be predictable and could restart the
> download if the 'git clone' process was halted for any
> reason. (Resuming a download due to a network error
> noticed in-process is possibly simpler.)
>
> This might be a more focused approach that is more
> likely to have progress in a GSoC project.
>
> That said, I don't have the capacity to be a mentor,
> but I thought it worth mentioning this variant of the
> project.
>
> Thanks,
> -Stolee

Thanks for your insight. I will write a proposal based on this and
hopefully get a mentor, while trying to understand how git bundle
cloning works.

thanks,
  -- Khalid Masum