git/Documentation/urls.txt
Jeff King 0d0bac67ce transport: drop support for git-over-rsync
The git-over-rsync protocol is inefficient and broken, and
has been for a long time. It transfers way more objects than
it needs (grabbing all of the remote's "objects/",
regardless of which objects we need). It does its own ad-hoc
parsing of loose and packed refs from the remote, but
doesn't properly override packed refs with loose ones,
leading to garbage results (e.g., expecting the other side
to have an object pointed to by a stale packed-refs entry,
or complaining that the other side has two copies of the
refs[1]).

This latter breakage means that nobody could have
successfully pulled from a moderately active repository
since cd547b4 (fetch/push: readd rsync support, 2007-10-01).

We never made an official deprecation notice in the release
notes for git's rsync protocol, but the tutorial has marked
it as such since 914328a (Update tutorial., 2005-08-30).
And on the mailing list as far back as Oct 2005, we can find
Junio mentioning it as having "been deprecated for quite
some time."[2,3,4]. So it was old news then; cogito had
deprecated the transport in July of 2005[5] (though it did
come back briefly when Linus broke git-http-pull!).

Of course some people professed their love of rsync through
2006, but Linus clarified in his usual gentle manner[6]:

  > Thanks!  This is why I still use rsync, even though
  > everybody and their mother tells me "Linus says rsync is
  > deprecated."

  No. You're using rsync because you're actively doing
  something _wrong_.

The deprecation sentiment was reinforced in 2008, with a
mention that cloning via rsync is broken (with no fix)[7].

Even the commit porting rsync over to C from shell (cd547b4)
lists it as deprecated! So between the 10 years of informal
warnings, and the fact that it has been severely broken
since 2007, it's probably safe to simply remove it without
further deprecation warnings.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/285101
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/10093
[3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/17734
[4] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18911
[5] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/5617
[6] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/19354
[7] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/103635

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2016-02-01 13:07:41 -08:00

106 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext

GIT URLS[[URLS]]
----------------
In general, URLs contain information about the transport protocol, the
address of the remote server, and the path to the repository.
Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be
absent.
Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp,
and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and
deprecated; do not use it).
The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and
should be used with caution on unsecured networks.
The following syntaxes may be used with them:
- ssh://{startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
- git://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
- http{startsb}s{endsb}://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
- ftp{startsb}s{endsb}://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:
- {startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz:path/to/repo.git/
This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the
first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a
colon. For example the local path `foo:bar` could be specified as an
absolute path or `./foo:bar` to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh
url.
The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~username expansion:
- ssh://{startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/~{startsb}user{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
- git://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/~{startsb}user{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
- {startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz:/~{startsb}user{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
For local repositories, also supported by Git natively, the following
syntaxes may be used:
- /path/to/repo.git/
- \file:///path/to/repo.git/
ifndef::git-clone[]
These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except when cloning, when
the former implies --local option. See linkgit:git-clone[1] for
details.
endif::git-clone[]
ifdef::git-clone[]
These two syntaxes are mostly equivalent, except the former implies
--local option.
endif::git-clone[]
When Git doesn't know how to handle a certain transport protocol, it
attempts to use the 'remote-<transport>' remote helper, if one
exists. To explicitly request a remote helper, the following syntax
may be used:
- <transport>::<address>
where <address> may be a path, a server and path, or an arbitrary
URL-like string recognized by the specific remote helper being
invoked. See linkgit:gitremote-helpers[1] for details.
If there are a large number of similarly-named remote repositories and
you want to use a different format for them (such that the URLs you
use will be rewritten into URLs that work), you can create a
configuration section of the form:
------------
[url "<actual url base>"]
insteadOf = <other url base>
------------
For example, with this:
------------
[url "git://git.host.xz/"]
insteadOf = host.xz:/path/to/
insteadOf = work:
------------
a URL like "work:repo.git" or like "host.xz:/path/to/repo.git" will be
rewritten in any context that takes a URL to be "git://git.host.xz/repo.git".
If you want to rewrite URLs for push only, you can create a
configuration section of the form:
------------
[url "<actual url base>"]
pushInsteadOf = <other url base>
------------
For example, with this:
------------
[url "ssh://example.org/"]
pushInsteadOf = git://example.org/
------------
a URL like "git://example.org/path/to/repo.git" will be rewritten to
"ssh://example.org/path/to/repo.git" for pushes, but pulls will still
use the original URL.