Re: Feature suggestion for read-only access to fsfs repos over http

Hi Greg, thanks for your answer.

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005, Greg Hudson wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 18:41, Henrik Thostrup Jensen wrote:
>> While I can do all sorts of hackish ways to solve the problem (post-commit
>> hook or cron job to produce directories/tarballs/emails) I would like to
>> able to do checkout over http and update directly from it. I don't see why
>> this should be much different than checking out from a local read-only
>> fsfs repo.
>
> Arch does what you want here (it has a virtual
> least-common-denominator-filesystem layer, and archive storage goes
> through that layer rather than to the filesystem directly), but
> Subversion does not.

Yes, I've tried Arch(tla) some time ago, but it made my head hurt a bit
too much :-). I'm thinking about checking out bazaar-ng, but it looks a
bit untested for an RCS tool though. However the author agrees with me
that being able to have anon read-only access over plain http is a good
idea[1].

> Part of the problem is that FSFS files are indexed; Subversion does not
> read all of an FSFS file at once in order to perform an operation, but
> seeks around within them. I'm not sure if HTTP and its various
> implementations are good for that. I also suspect that network latency
> would kill your performance.

I see. It is possible to do partial GETs over HTTP; constructing a caching
layer on top of this could probably provide some reasonable perfomance,
but I don't know how much seeking and stuff Subversion does.

If http dirs was mountable (well they are, but most people does not use
Hurd/LUFS/Fuse) this would be dead easy, since the svn client could see it
as a local directory. It just needs to told that accessing files over http
isn't that different ;-).

Performance might be an issue, however for small repos (this one is
currently ~400K), it won't matter.

1. http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/bzr/london-2004.html

     Best regards, Henrik

  stud.scient Henrik Thostrup Jensen
  Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University
  E-mail: htj -at- cs.aau.dk, WWW: http://www.cs.aau.dk/~htj/

--
"My other car is a cdr."
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