RFC Implementation of fetch-blobs and fetch-refs

My previous proposal about a possible new server endpoint that serves blobs and refs [1] didn't seem to garner much interest, so I thought I'd provide a possible implementation of that proposal as a work in progress.

In particular, patch 1 demonstrates that a new server endpoint that serves refs without the initial ref advertisement can be done in 228 lines of code (according to "git diff --stat") while accounting for the various special cases that upload-pack imposes (stateless RPC, inclusion of an additional response when depth is requested, handling of "done" in request, sending a packfile directly after a response containing "ACK ready" without waiting for "done", and so on).

I'm hoping that these features would be of more interest to more people. To that end, I'm sending these patches in the hope of showing that these features are useful (omitting ref advertisements help greatly when serving large repos, as described in the commit message of patch 1, and serving blobs is useful for any fetch-blob-on-demand repo scheme) and that my proposed way of implementing them can be done in a relatively uncomplicated manner (as seen in these patches).

Patch 1-3 show what serving refs without the advertisement would look like from the server's and fetch-pack's points of view. Patch 4 is similar to some of the other blob-serving patches except that this contains reachability checks and that this bundles the resulting objects in a packfile.

[1] <[email protected]>

Jonathan Tan (4):
server-endpoint: serve refs without advertisement
fetch-pack: refactor "want" pkt-line generation
fetch-pack: support new server endpoint
server-endpoint: serve blobs by hash

 .gitignore                 |   1 +
 Makefile                   |   3 +
 builtin/fetch-pack.c       |  10 +-
 fetch-pack.c               | 129 +++++++++++------
 fetch-pack.h               |   1 +
 server-endpoint.c          | 347 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 t/helper/.gitignore        |   1 +
 t/helper/test-un-pkt.c     |  40 ++++++
 t/t5573-server-endpoint.sh |  60 ++++++++
 t/t9999-mytests.sh         | 242 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 10 files changed, 790 insertions(+), 44 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 server-endpoint.c
 create mode 100644 t/helper/test-un-pkt.c
 create mode 100644 t/t5573-server-endpoint.sh
 create mode 100644 t/t9999-mytests.sh

2.12.2.715.g7642488e1d-goog