[webkit-dev] github mirror

[David Barr]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:49 AM, Simon Hausmann
<simon.hausmann at nokia.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 24, 2012 03:59:47 PM Tor Arne Vestbø wrote:
>> On 24.04.12 15:55, ext Adam Roben wrote:
>> > Probably the biggest issue is for people who've been using
>> > git.webkit.org and now want to try out GitHub. Since the commits are
>> > distinct between the two repositories, they have to do a full clone to
>> > make the switch.
>>
>> Any idea why git is not smarter when pulling down the objects?
>
> I think it's to minimize the traffic in the git protocol. If you just compare
> git commits, you can calculate the delta relatively quickly with fewer
> roundtrips. If server and client start to negotiate on the git object level
> itself it's going to take months to figure out which objects the client has and
> which ones are missing :)

A relevant fact is that you may avoid clients having to re-fetch all
trees and blobs if the mirror hosts both histories on different heads,
eg. refs/heads/master and refs/heads/github.

--
David Barr