[PATCH 0 of 2 bfiles] support HTTP stores (as client and server)

[Benjamin Pollack]

On Jun 4, 2010, at 1:52 PM, Greg Ward wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 6:47 PM, alexandru <alex at hackd.net> wrote:
>> This series implements HTTP stores, so you can push/pull/verify big files over HTTP.
> 
> Thank you!  This looks very good.  Some random comments:
> 
>  * Would you mind using your full name in the commit?  Pretty soon
> now I have to write down the list of contributors, and just plain
> "alexandru" is a bit vague.
> 
>  * I think your patches are in the wrong order: after applying the
> client-side changes, bfput over HTTP cannot possibly work.  Apply the
> server-side change first, and we avoid that problem.
> 
>  * I'm unclear how this would be deployed.  If I understand, it looks
> like the admin of the machine where the central store lives will have
> to arrange for "hg bfserve --http" to be called in some circumstances.
> When?  On every request? At system startup?  What if I want to use
> (say) Apache as the front-end (for SSL, authentication, etc.) -- would
> I have to setup mod_proxy?
> 
>  * tests?
> 
>  * terminology: I deliberately use "put" rather than "push".  You
> push changesets, but you put big files.  I saw one or two comments
> that said "push" but should say "put".  Likewise you pull changesets
> but get big files.  (Early on, bfupdate was going to be called bfget,
> but then I realized it has to delete files too.)
> 
> Another way to provide the server-side component of this would be as a
> CGI or WSGI script -- e.g. "hg bfserve --cgi /path/to/store".  Then
> the admin has to arrange for Apache to run that for certain URLs.
> That's more consistent with how hgweb works, which I think is nice.
> 
> OTOH, a standalone HTTP server is much easier to write tests for.  Hmmmm.


The original idea was to allow "hg bfiles --http" to give you a quick, bfiles-enabled equivalent of "hg serve". Just as you use Mercurial's WSGI/CGI script when you're hosting repositories in production, I'm sure you'd use a "real" web server with PUT/HEAD or whatever in production. Adding "hg bfiles --cgi" might be exactly the way to do that for the common case, but I think there's a lot of value in having bfiles be brain-dead easy to get started with à la hg serve to help get started--especially in Windows environments, where getting everything set up can be a royal pain.

--Benjamin