Re: What's up with the GIT archive on www.kernel.org?

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> Btw, there's no reason why a client-side thing couldn't just parse the 
> "alternates" thing, and if it doesn't find the objects in the main object 
> directory, go and fetch them from the alternates itself.

There is.

For kernel.org, you could say '/pub/scm/blah' in your alternates
and expect it to work, only because http://kernel.org/pub
hierarchy happens to match the absolute path /pub on the
filesystem, but for most people's default HTTP server
installation, they would need to say /var/www/scm/blah to have
alternate work locally, but somebody has to know that the named
directory is served as http://machine.xz/pub/scm/blah somewhere.

Client side smarts need some help from the user here to know
that '/var/www/scm/blah' read off of objects/info/alternates
match that URL.