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Re: HTTP protocol v2: rethunk.

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_xbc.nu>
Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:09:21 +0100

Blair Zajac wrote:
> David Glasser wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Blair Zajac <blair_at_orcaware.com> wrote:
>>> Greg Hudson wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 09:28 -0800, Blair Zajac wrote:
>>>>> Where I'm coming from is treating the svn_fs.h API as a versioned
>>>>> filesystem, ignoring the version control aspects of svn, so making
>>>>> this
>>>>> available via HTTP could be useful and have interesting applications
>>>>> available in the future.
>>>> Subversion's architecture has never included making the FS interface
>>>> available over the network. There's no reason someone can't make a
>>>> network binding to the FS layer (as you did), but that's not in any
>>>> way,
>>>> shape, or form the job of the Subversion RA layer.
>>> There's two different things as I see it, correct me if I'm wrong.
>>> There's
>>> the RA layer in C which will use the protocol. This won't change
>>> and I'm
>>> not suggesting modifying it. I'm just saying, make the new protocol
>>> capable
>>> of making the FS interface available over the network. Other people
>>> can
>>> write their own code on top of the protocol separate from the RA layer.
>>
>> That sounds like a great third-party project, but I don't see why it
>> has any business being part of the already-overextended subversion
>> core.
>
> I'm not saying we write that other code, I'm just saying the protocol
> should support it.

Frankly, that seems like a complete waste of time to me. Sure a
"versioned remote filesystem" sounds like an interesting piece of
infrastructure, but it's utter nonsense to try to invent a new protocol
for that. Much better to do this as a local layered FS (e.g., a FUSE
layer on Linux that talks to a local repository) and then expose that to
remote clients via any of the myriad mature remote-filesystem servers.

That said, the subversion repository is not really suitable as a FS
back-end without a lot of fiddling and additional caching, partial
writes to versioned resources would be a nightmare.

-- Brane

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Received on 2008-11-08 13:09:43 CET

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