Currently fetching a one-level ref like "refs/foo" does not
work consistently. The outer "git fetch" program filters the
list of refs, checking each against check_refname_format.
Then it feeds the result to do_fetch_pack to actually
negotiate the haves/wants and get the pack. The fetch-pack
code does its own filter, and it behaves differently.
The fetch-pack filter looks for refs in "refs/", and then
feeds everything _after_ the slash (i.e., just "foo") into
check_refname_format. But check_refname_format is not
designed to look at a partial refname. It complains that the
ref has only one component, thinking it is at the root
(i.e., alongside "HEAD"), when in reality we just fed it a
partial refname.
As a result, we omit a ref like "refs/foo" from the pack
request, even though "git fetch" then tries to store the
resulting ref. If we happen to get the object anyway (e.g.,
because the ref is contained in another ref we are
fetching), then the fetch succeeds. But if it is a unique
object, we fail when trying to update "refs/foo".
We can fix this by just passing the whole refname into
check_refname_format; we know the part we were omitting is
"refs/", which is acceptable in a refname. This at least
makes the checks consistent with each other.
This problem happens most commonly with "refs/stash", which
is the only one-level ref in wide use. However, our test
does not use "refs/stash", as we may later want to restrict
it specifically (not because it is one-level, but because
of the semantics of stashes).
We may also want to do away with the multiple levels of
filtering (which can cause problems when they are out of
sync), or even forbid one-level refs entirely. However,
those decisions can come later; this fixes the most
immediate problem, which is the mismatch between the two.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Commit 58babfff ("shallow.c: the 8 steps to select new commits for
.git/shallow", 05-12-2013) added a function to implement step 5 of
the quoted eight steps, namely 'remove_nonexistent_ours_in_pack()'.
This function implements an optional optimization step in the new
shallow commit selection algorithm. However, this function has no
callers. (The commented out call sites would need to change, in
order to provide information required by the function.)
Signed-off-by: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsay1.demon.co.uk>
Acked-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Remove a few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix comparison
functions, and rename them to starts_with and ends_with.
* cc/starts-n-ends-with:
replace {pre,suf}fixcmp() with {starts,ends}_with()
strbuf: introduce starts_with() and ends_with()
builtin/remote: remove postfixcmp() and use suffixcmp() instead
environment: normalize use of prefixcmp() by removing " != 0"
The same steps are done as in when --update-shallow is not given. The
only difference is we now add all shallow commits in "ours" and
"theirs" to .git/shallow (aka "step 8").
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This patch just put together pieces from the 8 steps patch. We stop at
step 7 and reject refs that require new shallow commits.
Note that, by rejecting refs that require new shallow commits, we
leave dangling objects in the repo, which become "object islands" by
the next "git fetch" of the same source.
If the first fetch our "ours" set is zero and we do practically
nothing at step 7, "ours" is full at the next fetch and we may need to
walk through commits for reachability test. Room for improvement.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Cloning from a shallow repository does not follow the "8 steps for new
.git/shallow" because if it does we need to get through step 6 for all
refs. That means commit walking down to the bottom.
Instead the rule to create .git/shallow is simpler and, more
importantly, cheap: if a shallow commit is found in the pack, it's
probably used (i.e. reachable from some refs), so we add it. Others
are dropped.
One may notice this method seems flawed by the word "probably". A
shallow commit may not be reachable from any refs at all if it's
attached to an object island (a group of objects that are not
reachable by any refs).
If that object island is not complete, a new fetch request may send
more objects to connect it to some ref. At that time, because we
incorrectly installed the shallow commit in this island, the user will
not see anything after that commit (fsck is still ok). This is not
desired.
Given that object islands are rare (C Git never sends such islands for
security reasons) and do not really harm the repository integrity, a
tradeoff is made to surprise the user occasionally but work faster
everyday.
A new option --strict could be added later that follows exactly the 8
steps. "git prune" can also learn to remove dangling objects _and_ the
shallow commits that are attached to them from .git/shallow.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Leaving only the function definitions and declarations so that any
new topic in flight can still make use of the old functions, replace
existing uses of the prefixcmp() and suffixcmp() with new API
functions.
The change can be recreated by mechanically applying this:
$ git grep -l -e prefixcmp -e suffixcmp -- \*.c |
grep -v strbuf\\.c |
xargs perl -pi -e '
s|!prefixcmp\(|starts_with\(|g;
s|prefixcmp\(|!starts_with\(|g;
s|!suffixcmp\(|ends_with\(|g;
s|suffixcmp\(|!ends_with\(|g;
'
on the result of preparatory changes in this series.
Signed-off-by: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
* jk/robustify-parse-commit:
checkout: do not die when leaving broken detached HEAD
use parse_commit_or_die instead of custom message
use parse_commit_or_die instead of segfaulting
assume parse_commit checks for NULL commit
assume parse_commit checks commit->object.parsed
log_tree_diff: die when we fail to parse a commit
The codepath that send_pack() calls pack_objects() mistakenly
closed the same file descriptor twice, leading to potentially
closing a wrong file descriptor that was opened in the meantime.
* jl/pack-transfer-avoid-double-close:
Clear fd after closing to avoid double-close error
The parse_commit function will check the "parsed" flag of
the object and do nothing if it is set. There is no need
for callers to check the flag themselves, and doing so only
clutters the code.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history
during a "git fetch" into a shallow repository, objects that the
sending side knows the receiving end has were unnecessarily sent.
* nd/fetch-into-shallow:
Add testcase for needless objects during a shallow fetch
list-objects: mark more commits as edges in mark_edges_uninteresting
list-objects: reduce one argument in mark_edges_uninteresting
upload-pack: delegate rev walking in shallow fetch to pack-objects
shallow: add setup_temporary_shallow()
shallow: only add shallow graft points to new shallow file
move setup_alternate_shallow and write_shallow_commits to shallow.c
In send_pack(), clear the fd passed to pack_objects() by setting
it to -1, since pack_objects() closes the fd (via a call to
run_command()). Likewise, in get_pack(), clear the fd passed to
run_command().
Not doing so risks having git_transport_push(), caller of
send_pack(), closing the fd again, possibly incorrectly closing
some other open file; or similarly with fetch_refs_from_pack(),
indirect caller of get_pack().
Signed-off-by: Jens Lindström <jl@opera.com>
Acked-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Acked-by: Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history
during a fetch into a shallow repository, we unnecessarily sent
objects the sending side knows the receiving end has.
* nd/fetch-into-shallow:
Add testcase for needless objects during a shallow fetch
list-objects: mark more commits as edges in mark_edges_uninteresting
list-objects: reduce one argument in mark_edges_uninteresting
upload-pack: delegate rev walking in shallow fetch to pack-objects
shallow: add setup_temporary_shallow()
shallow: only add shallow graft points to new shallow file
move setup_alternate_shallow and write_shallow_commits to shallow.c
When --shallow-file is added to the command line, it has to be
before the subcommand name, the first argument won't be the command
name any more. Stop assuming that and keep track of the command name
explicitly.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Allow a safer "rewind of the remote tip" push than blind "--force",
by requiring that the overwritten remote ref to be unchanged since
the new history to replace it was prepared.
The machinery is more or less ready. The "--force" option is again
the big red button to override any safety, thanks to J6t's sanity
(the original round allowed --lockref to defeat --force).
The logic to choose the default implemented here is fragile
(e.g. "git fetch" after seeing a failure will update the
remote-tracking branch and will make the next "push" pass,
defeating the safety pretty easily). It is suitable only for the
simplest workflows, and it may hurt users more than it helps them.
* jc/push-cas:
push: teach --force-with-lease to smart-http transport
send-pack: fix parsing of --force-with-lease option
t5540/5541: smart-http does not support "--force-with-lease"
t5533: test "push --force-with-lease"
push --force-with-lease: tie it all together
push --force-with-lease: implement logic to populate old_sha1_expect[]
remote.c: add command line option parser for "--force-with-lease"
builtin/push.c: use OPT_BOOL, not OPT_BOOLEAN
cache.h: move remote/connect API out of it
The recent "short-cut clone connectivity check" topic broke a shallow
repository when a fetch operation tries to auto-follow tags.
* nd/fetch-pack-shallow-fix:
fetch-pack: do not remove .git/shallow file when --depth is not specified
The recent "short-cut clone connectivity check" topic broke a
shallow repository when a fetch operation tries to auto-follow tags.
* nd/fetch-pack-shallow-fix:
fetch-pack: do not remove .git/shallow file when --depth is not specified
fetch_pack() can remove .git/shallow file when a shallow repository
becomes a full one again. This behavior is triggered incorrectly when
tags are also fetched because fetch_pack() will be called twice. At
the first fetch_pack() call:
- shallow_lock is set up
- alternate_shallow_file points to shallow_lock.filename, which is
"shallow.lock"
- commit_lock_file is called, which sets shallow_lock.filename to "".
alternate_shallow_file also becomes "" because it points to the
same memory.
At the second call, setup_alternate_shallow() is not called and
alternate_shallow_file remains "". It's mistaken as unshallow case and
.git/shallow is removed. The end result is a broken repository.
Fix this by always initializing alternate_shallow_file when
fetch_pack() is called. As an extra measure, check if args->depth > 0
before commit/rollback shallow file.
Reported-by: Kacper Kornet <kornet@camk.edu.pl>
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The definition of "struct ref" in "cache.h", a header file so
central to the system, always confused me. This structure is not
about the local ref used by sha1-name API to name local objects.
It is what refspecs are expanded into, after finding out what refs
the other side has, to define what refs are updated after object
transfer succeeds to what values. It belongs to "remote.h" together
with "struct refspec".
While we are at it, also move the types and functions related to the
Git transport connection to a new header file connect.h
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When we call find_common to start finding common ancestors
with the remote side of a fetch, the first thing we do is
insert the tip of each ref into our rev_list linked list. We
keep the list sorted the whole time with
commit_list_insert_by_date, which means our insertion ends
up doing O(n^2) timestamp comparisons.
We could teach rev_list_push to use an unsorted list, and
then sort it once after we have added each ref. However, in
get_rev, we process the list by popping commits off the
front and adding parents back in timestamp-sorted order. So
that procedure would still operate on the large list.
Instead, we can replace the linked list with a heap-based
priority queue, which can do O(log n) insertion, making the
whole insertion procedure O(n log n).
As a result of switching to the prio_queue struct, we fix
two minor bugs:
1. When we "pop" a commit in get_rev, and when we clear
the rev_list in find_common, we do not take care to
free the "struct commit_list", and just leak its
memory. With the prio_queue implementation, the memory
management is handled for us.
2. In get_rev, we look at the head commit of the list,
possibly push its parents onto the list, and then "pop"
the front of the list off, assuming it is the same
element that we just peeked at. This is typically going
to be the case, but would not be in the face of clock
skew: the parents are inserted by date, and could
potentially be inserted at the head of the list if they
have a timestamp newer than their descendent. In this
case, we would accidentally pop the parent, and never
process it at all.
The new implementation pulls the commit off of the
queue as we examine it, and so does not suffer from
this problem.
With this patch, a fetch of a single commit into a
repository with 50,000 refs went from:
real 0m7.984s
user 0m7.852s
sys 0m0.120s
to:
real 0m2.017s
user 0m1.884s
sys 0m0.124s
Before this patch, a larger case with 370K refs still had
not completed after tens of minutes; with this patch, it
completes in about 12 seconds.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We insert the commit pointed to by each ref one-by-one into
the "complete" commit_list using insert_by_date. Because
each insertion is O(n), we end up with O(n^2) behavior.
This typically doesn't matter, because the number of refs is
reasonably small. And even if there are a lot of refs, they
often point to a smaller set of objects (in which case the
optimization in commit ea5f220 keeps our "n" small).
However, in pathological repositories (hundreds of thousands
of refs, each pointing to a unique commit), this quadratic
behavior can make a difference. Since we do not care about
the list order until we have finished building it, we can
simply keep it unsorted during the insertion phase, then
sort it afterwards.
On a repository like the one described above, this dropped
the time to do a no-op fetch from 2.0s to 1.7s. On normal
repositories, it probably does not matter at all, but it
does not hurt to protect ourselves from pathological cases.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In order to make sure the cloned repository is good, we run "rev-list
--objects --not --all $new_refs" on the repository. This is expensive
on large repositories. This patch attempts to mitigate the impact in
this special case.
In the "good" clone case, we only have one pack. If all of the
following are met, we can be sure that all objects reachable from the
new refs exist, which is the intention of running "rev-list ...":
- all refs point to an object in the pack
- there are no dangling pointers in any object in the pack
- no objects in the pack point to objects outside the pack
The second and third checks can be done with the help of index-pack as
a slight variation of --strict check (which introduces a new condition
for the shortcut: pack transfer must be used and the number of objects
large enough to call index-pack). The first is checked in
check_everything_connected after we get an "ok" from index-pack.
"index-pack + new checks" is still faster than the current "index-pack
+ rev-list", which is the whole point of this patch. If any of the
conditions fail, we fall back to the good old but expensive "rev-list
..". In that case it's even more expensive because we have to pay for
the new checks in index-pack. But that should only happen when the
other side is either buggy or malicious.
Cloning linux-2.6 over file://
before after
real 3m25.693s 2m53.050s
user 5m2.037s 4m42.396s
sys 0m13.750s 0m16.574s
A more realistic test with ssh:// over wireless
before after
real 11m26.629s 10m4.213s
user 5m43.196s 5m19.444s
sys 0m35.812s 0m37.630s
This shortcut is not applied to shallow clones, partly because shallow
clones should have no more objects than a usual fetch and the cost of
rev-list is acceptable, partly to avoid dealing with corner cases when
grafting is involved.
This shortcut does not apply to unpack-objects code path either
because the number of objects must be small in order to trigger that
code path.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
index-pack --strict looks up and follows parent commits. If shallow
information is not ready by the time index-pack is run, index-pack may
be led to non-existent objects. Make fetch-pack save shallow file to
disk before invoking index-pack.
git learns new global option --shallow-file to pass on the alternate
shallow file path. Undocumented (and not even support --shallow-file=
syntax) because it's unlikely to be used again elsewhere.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Clean up pkt-line API, implementation and its callers to make them
more robust.
* jk/pkt-line-cleanup:
do not use GIT_TRACE_PACKET=3 in tests
remote-curl: always parse incoming refs
remote-curl: move ref-parsing code up in file
remote-curl: pass buffer straight to get_remote_heads
teach get_remote_heads to read from a memory buffer
pkt-line: share buffer/descriptor reading implementation
pkt-line: provide a LARGE_PACKET_MAX static buffer
pkt-line: move LARGE_PACKET_MAX definition from sideband
pkt-line: teach packet_read_line to chomp newlines
pkt-line: provide a generic reading function with options
pkt-line: drop safe_write function
pkt-line: move a misplaced comment
write_or_die: raise SIGPIPE when we get EPIPE
upload-archive: use argv_array to store client arguments
upload-archive: do not copy repo name
send-pack: prefer prefixcmp over memcmp in receive_status
fetch-pack: fix out-of-bounds buffer offset in get_ack
upload-pack: remove packet debugging harness
upload-pack: do not add duplicate objects to shallow list
upload-pack: use get_sha1_hex to parse "shallow" lines
Allows requests to fetch objects at any tip of refs (including
hidden ones). It seems that there may be use cases even outside
Gerrit (e.g. $gmane/215701).
* jc/fetch-raw-sha1:
fetch: fetch objects by their exact SHA-1 object names
upload-pack: optionally allow fetching from the tips of hidden refs
fetch: use struct ref to represent refs to be fetched
parse_fetch_refspec(): clarify the codeflow a bit
Most of the callers of packet_read_line just read into a
static 1000-byte buffer (callers which handle arbitrary
binary data already use LARGE_PACKET_MAX). This works fine
in practice, because:
1. The only variable-sized data in these lines is a ref
name, and refs tend to be a lot shorter than 1000
characters.
2. When sending ref lines, git-core always limits itself
to 1000 byte packets.
However, the only limit given in the protocol specification
in Documentation/technical/protocol-common.txt is
LARGE_PACKET_MAX; the 1000 byte limit is mentioned only in
pack-protocol.txt, and then only describing what we write,
not as a specific limit for readers.
This patch lets us bump the 1000-byte limit to
LARGE_PACKET_MAX. Even though git-core will never write a
packet where this makes a difference, there are two good
reasons to do this:
1. Other git implementations may have followed
protocol-common.txt and used a larger maximum size. We
don't bump into it in practice because it would involve
very long ref names.
2. We may want to increase the 1000-byte limit one day.
Since packets are transferred before any capabilities,
it's difficult to do this in a backwards-compatible
way. But if we bump the size of buffer the readers can
handle, eventually older versions of git will be
obsolete enough that we can justify bumping the
writers, as well. We don't have plans to do this
anytime soon, but there is no reason not to start the
clock ticking now.
Just bumping all of the reading bufs to LARGE_PACKET_MAX
would waste memory. Instead, since most readers just read
into a temporary buffer anyway, let's provide a single
static buffer that all callers can use. We can further wrap
this detail away by having the packet_read_line wrapper just
use the buffer transparently and return a pointer to the
static storage. That covers most of the cases, and the
remaining ones already read into their own LARGE_PACKET_MAX
buffers.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The packets sent during ref negotiation are all terminated
by newline; even though the code to chomp these newlines is
short, we end up doing it in a lot of places.
This patch teaches packet_read_line to auto-chomp the
trailing newline; this lets us get rid of a lot of inline
chomping code.
As a result, some call-sites which are not reading
line-oriented data (e.g., when reading chunks of packfiles
alongside sideband) transition away from packet_read_line to
the generic packet_read interface. This patch converts all
of the existing callsites.
Since the function signature of packet_read_line does not
change (but its behavior does), there is a possibility of
new callsites being introduced in later commits, silently
introducing an incompatibility. However, since a later
patch in this series will change the signature, such a
commit would have to be merged directly into this commit,
not to the tip of the series; we can therefore ignore the
issue.
This is an internal cleanup and should produce no change of
behavior in the normal case. However, there is one corner
case to note. Callers of packet_read_line have never been
able to tell the difference between a flush packet ("0000")
and an empty packet ("0004"), as both cause packet_read_line
to return a length of 0. Readers treat them identically,
even though Documentation/technical/protocol-common.txt says
we must not; it also says that implementations should not
send an empty pkt-line.
By stripping out the newline before the result gets to the
caller, we will now treat the newline-only packet ("0005\n")
the same as an empty packet, which in turn gets treated like
a flush packet. In practice this doesn't matter, as neither
empty nor newline-only packets are part of git's protocols
(at least not for the line-oriented bits, and readers who
are not expecting line-oriented packets will be calling
packet_read directly, anyway). But even if we do decide to
care about the distinction later, it is orthogonal to this
patch. The right place to tighten would be to stop treating
empty packets as flush packets, and this change does not
make doing so any harder.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This is just write_or_die by another name. The one
distinction is that write_or_die will treat EPIPE specially
by suppressing error messages. That's fine, as we die by
SIGPIPE anyway (and in the off chance that it is disabled,
write_or_die will simulate it).
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When we read acks from the remote, we expect either:
ACK <sha1>
or
ACK <sha1> <multi-ack-flag>
We parse the "ACK <sha1>" bit from the line, and then start
looking for the flag strings at "line+45"; if we don't have
them, we assume it's of the first type. But if we do have
the first type, then line+45 is not necessarily inside our
string at all!
It turns out that this works most of the time due to the way
we parse the packets. They should come in with a newline,
and packet_read puts an extra NUL into the buffer, so we end
up with:
ACK <sha1>\n\0
with the newline at offset 44 and the NUL at offset 45. We
then strip the newline, putting a NUL at offset 44. So
when we look at "line+45", we are looking past the end of
our string; but it's OK, because we hit the terminator from
the original string.
This breaks down, however, if the other side does not
terminate their packets with a newline. In that case, our
packet is one character shorter, and we start looking
through uninitialized memory for the flag. No known
implementation sends such a packet, so it has never come up
in practice.
This patch tightens the check by looking for a short,
flagless ACK before trying to parse the flag.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Teach "git fetch" to accept an exact SHA-1 object name the user may
obtain out of band on the LHS of a pathspec, and send it on a "want"
message when the server side advertises the allow-tip-sha1-in-want
capability.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Even though "git fetch" has full infrastructure to parse refspecs to
be fetched and match them against the list of refs to come up with
the final list of refs to be fetched, the list of refs that are
requested to be fetched were internally converted to a plain list of
strings at the transport layer and then passed to the underlying
fetch-pack driver.
Stop this conversion and instead pass around an array of refs.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Help "fetch only" repositories that do not trigger "gc --auto"
often enough.
* jk/gc-auto-after-fetch:
fetch-pack: avoid repeatedly re-scanning pack directory
fetch: run gc --auto after fetching
fetch_pack() is used by transport.c, part of libgit.a while it stays
in builtin/fetch-pack.c. Move it to fetch-pack.c so that we won't get
undefined reference if a program that uses libgit.a happens to pull it
in.
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
This uses "git-apply --whitespace=strip" to fix whitespace errors that have
crept in to our source files over time. There are a few files that need
to have trailing whitespaces (most notably, test vectors). The results
still passes the test, and build result in Documentation/ area is unchanged.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Make git notify the user about host resolution/connection attempts.
This is useful both as a progress indicator on slow links, and helps
reassure the user there are no firewall problems.
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@dev.mellanox.co.il>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
* 'js/fetch-progress' (early part):
Fixup no-progress for fetch & clone
fetch & clone: do not output progress when not on a tty
Conflicts:
git-fetch.sh
The intent of the commit 'fetch & clone: do not output progress when
not on a tty' was to make fetching and cloning less chatty when
output was not redirected (such as in a cron job).
However, there was a serious thinko in that commit. It assumed that
the client _and_ the server got this update at the same time. But
this is obviously not the case, and therefore upload-pack died on
seeing the option "--no-progress".
This patch fixes that issue by making it a protocol option. So, until
your server is updated, you still see the progress, but once the
server has this patch, it will be quiet.
A minor issue was also fixed: when cloning, the checkout did not
heed no_progress.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Previous step converted use of strncmp() with literal string
mechanically even when the result is only used as a boolean:
if (!strncmp("foo", arg, 3)) ==> if (!(-prefixcmp(arg, "foo")))
This step manually cleans them up to read:
if (!prefixcmp(arg, "foo"))
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This mechanically converts strncmp() to use prefixcmp(), but only when
the parameters match specific patterns, so that they can be verified
easily. Leftover from this will be fixed in a separate step, including
idiotic conversions like
if (!strncmp("foo", arg, 3))
=>
if (!(-prefixcmp(arg, "foo")))
This was done by using this script in px.perl
#!/usr/bin/perl -i.bak -p
if (/strncmp\(([^,]+), "([^\\"]*)", (\d+)\)/ && (length($2) == $3)) {
s|strncmp\(([^,]+), "([^\\"]*)", (\d+)\)|prefixcmp($1, "$2")|;
}
if (/strncmp\("([^\\"]*)", ([^,]+), (\d+)\)/ && (length($1) == $3)) {
s|strncmp\("([^\\"]*)", ([^,]+), (\d+)\)|(-prefixcmp($2, "$1"))|;
}
and running:
$ git grep -l strncmp -- '*.c' | xargs perl px.perl
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This adds the option "--no-progress" to fetch-pack and upload-pack,
and makes fetch and clone pass this option when stdout is not a tty.
While at documenting that option, also document --strict and --timeout
options for upload-pack.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Back when only handful commands that created commit and tag were
the only users of committer identity information, it made sense
to explicitly call setup_ident() to pre-fill the default value
from the gecos information. But it is much simpler for programs
to make the call automatic when get_ident() is called these days,
since many more programs want to use the information when updating
the reflog.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This allows transfer.unpackLimit to specify what these two
configuration variables want to set.
We would probably want to deprecate the two separate variables,
as I do not see much point in specifying them independently.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This makes git-fetch over git native protocol to automatically
decide to keep the downloaded pack if the fetch results in more
than 100 objects, just like receive-pack invoked by git-push
does. This logic is disabled when --keep is explicitly given
from the command line, so that a very small clone still keeps
the downloaded pack as before.
The 100 threshold can be adjusted with fetch.unpacklimit
configuration. We might want to introduce transfer.unpacklimit
to consolidate the two unpacklimit variables, which will be a
topic for the next patch.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
With --keep-auto option, fetch-pack decides to keep the pack
without exploding it just like receive-pack does.
We may want to later make this the default.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Just some option name disambiguation. This is the counter part to
commit d23842fd which made a similar change for push and send-pack.
--exec continues to work.
Signed-off-by: Uwe Kleine-König <ukleinek@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
add all supported options to Documentation/git-....txt and the usage strings.
Signed-off-by: Uwe Kleine-König <zeisberg@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
They are used in atexit() for clean-up, and you will be
accessing unallocated memory at that point.
See 31f584c2 for the fix for a similar problem.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This is to adjust to:
count-objects -v: show number of packs as well.
which will break a test in this series.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This is a mechanical clean-up of the way *.c files include
system header files.
(1) sources under compat/, platform sha-1 implementations, and
xdelta code are exempt from the following rules;
(2) the first #include must be "git-compat-util.h" or one of
our own header file that includes it first (e.g. config.h,
builtin.h, pkt-line.h);
(3) system headers that are included in "git-compat-util.h"
need not be included in individual C source files.
(4) "git-compat-util.h" does not have to include subsystem
specific header files (e.g. expat.h).
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
A better fix may be to only fetch tags that point to commits that we
are downloading, but git-clone doesn't have support for following
tags. This will happen automatically on the next git-fetch though.
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Julliard <julliard@winehq.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Now, by saying "git fetch -depth <n> <repo>" you can deepen
a shallow repository.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
By specifying a depth, you can now clone a repository such that
all fetched ancestor-chains' length is at most "depth". For example,
if the upstream repository has only 2 branches ("A" and "B"), which
are linear, and you specify depth 3, you will get A, A~1, A~2, A~3,
B, B~1, B~2, and B~3. The ends are automatically made shallow
commits.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
A shallow commit is a commit which has parents, which in turn are
"grafted away", i.e. the commit appears as if it were a root.
Since these shallow commits should not be edited by the user, but
only by core git, they are recorded in the file $GIT_DIR/shallow.
A repository containing shallow commits is called shallow.
The advantage of a shallow repository is that even if the upstream
contains lots of history, your local (shallow) repository needs not
occupy much disk space.
The disadvantage is that you might miss a merge base when pulling
some remote branch.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Since functions in fetch-clone.c were only used from fetch-pack.c,
its content has been merged with fetch-pack.c. This allows for better
coupling of features with much simpler implementations.
One new thing is that the (abscence of) --thin also enforce it on
index-pack now, such that index-pack will abort if a thin pack was
_not_ asked for.
The -k or --keep, when provided twice, now causes the fetched pack
to be left as a kept pack just like receive-pack currently does.
Eventually this will be used to close a race against concurrent
repacking.
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
* master: (90 commits)
gitweb: Better support for non-CSS aware web browsers
gitweb: Output also empty patches in "commitdiff" view
gitweb: Use git-for-each-ref to generate list of heads and/or tags
for-each-ref: "creator" and "creatordate" fields
Add --global option to git-repo-config.
pack-refs: Store the full name of the ref even when packing only tags.
git-clone documentation didn't mention --origin as equivalent of -o
Minor grammar fixes for git-diff-index.txt
link_temp_to_file: call adjust_shared_perm() only when we created the directory
Remove uneccessarily similar printf() from print_ref_list() in builtin-branch
pack-objects doesn't create random pack names
branch: work in subdirectories.
gitweb: Use 's' regexp modifier to secure against filenames with LF
gitweb: Secure against commit-ish/tree-ish with the same name as path
gitweb: esc_html() author in blame
git-svnimport: support for partial imports
link_temp_to_file: don't leave the path truncated on adjust_shared_perm failure
Move deny_non_fast_forwards handling completely into receive-pack.
revision traversal: --unpacked does not limit commit list anymore.
Continue traversal when rev-list --unpacked finds a packed commit.
...
* lj/refs: (63 commits)
Fix show-ref usagestring
t3200: git-branch testsuite update
sha1_name.c: avoid compilation warnings.
Make git-branch a builtin
ref-log: fix D/F conflict coming from deleted refs.
git-revert with conflicts to behave as git-merge with conflicts
core.logallrefupdates thinko-fix
git-pack-refs --all
core.logallrefupdates create new log file only for branch heads.
Remove bashism from t3210-pack-refs.sh
ref-log: allow ref@{count} syntax.
pack-refs: call fflush before fsync.
pack-refs: use lockfile as everybody else does.
git-fetch: do not look into $GIT_DIR/refs to see if a tag exists.
lock_ref_sha1_basic does not remove empty directories on BSD
Do not create tag leading directories since git update-ref does it.
Check that a tag exists using show-ref instead of looking for the ref file.
Use git-update-ref to delete a tag instead of rm()ing the ref file.
Fix refs.c;:repack_without_ref() clean-up path
Clean up "git-branch.sh" and add remove recursive dir test cases.
...
Now that index-pack can be streamed with a pack, it is probably a good
idea to use it directly instead of creating a temporary file and running
index-pack afterwards. This way index-pack can abort early whenever a
corruption is encountered even if the pack has not been fully
downloaded, it can display a progress percentage as it knows how much to
expects, and it is a bit faster since the pack indexing is partially
done as data is received. Using fetch -k doesn't need to disable thin
pack generation on the remote end either.
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
There is no reason not to always do this when both ends agree.
Therefore a client that can accept offsets to delta base always sends
the "ofs-delta" flag. The server will stream a pack with or without
offset to delta base depending on whether that flag is provided or not
with no additional cost.
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This adds a "int *flag" parameter to resolve_ref() and makes
for_each_ref() family to call callback function with an extra
"int flag" parameter. They are used to give two bits of
information (REF_ISSYMREF and REF_ISPACKED) about the ref.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This is a long overdue fix to the API for for_each_ref() family
of functions. It allows the callers to specify a callback data
pointer, so that the caller does not have to use static
variables to communicate with the callback funciton.
The updated for_each_ref() family takes a function of type
int (*fn)(const char *, const unsigned char *, void *)
and a void pointer as parameters, and calls the function with
the name of the ref and its SHA-1 with the caller-supplied void
pointer as parameters.
The commit updates two callers, builtin-name-rev.c and
builtin-pack-refs.c as an example.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
* jc/archive:
git-tar-tree: devolve git-tar-tree into a wrapper for git-archive
git-archive: inline default_parse_extra()
builtin-archive.c: rename remote_request() to extract_remote_arg()
upload-archive: monitor child communication more carefully.
Add sideband status report to git-archive protocol
Prepare larger packet buffer for upload-pack protocol.
Teach --exec to git-archive --remote
Add --verbose to git-archive
archive: force line buffered output to stderr
Use xstrdup instead of strdup in builtin-{tar,zip}-tree.c
Move sideband server side support into reusable form.
Move sideband client side support into reusable form.
archive: allow remote to have more formats than we understand.
git-archive: make compression level of ZIP archives configurable
Add git-upload-archive
git-archive: wire up ZIP format.
git-archive: wire up TAR format.
Add git-archive
The original side-band support added to the upload-pack protocol used the
default 1000-byte packet length. The pkt-line format allows up to 64k, so
prepare the receiver for the maximum size, and have the uploader and
downloader negotiate if larger packet length is allowed.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This abstracts away the size of the hash values when copying them
from memory location to memory location, much as the introduction
of hashcmp abstracted away hash value comparsion.
A few call sites were using char* rather than unsigned char* so
I added the cast rather than open hashcpy to be void*. This is a
reasonable tradeoff as most call sites already use unsigned char*
and the existing hashcmp is also declared to be unsigned char*.
[jc: Splitted the patch to "master" part, to be followed by a
patch for merge-recursive.c which is not in "master" yet.
Fixed the cast in the latter hunk to combine-diff.c which was
wrong in the original.
Also converted ones left-over in combine-diff.c, diff-lib.c and
upload-pack.c ]
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
[jc: I needed to hand merge the changes to the updated codebase,
so the result needs to be checked.]
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This updates the type-enumeration constants introduced to reduce
the memory footprint of "struct object" to match the type bits
already used in the packfile format, by removing the former
(i.e. TYPE_* constant macros) and using the latter (i.e. enum
object_type) throughout the code for consistency.
Eventually we can stop passing around the "type strings"
entirely, and this will help - no confusion about two different
integer enumeration.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This implements a protocol extension between fetch-pack and
upload-pack to allow stderr stream from upload-pack (primarily
used for the progress bar display) to be passed back.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This shrinks "struct object" by a small amount, by getting rid of the
"struct type *" pointer and replacing it with a 3-bit bitfield instead.
In addition, we merge the bitfields and the "flags" field, which
incidentally should also remove a useless 4-byte padding from the object
when in 64-bit mode.
Now, our "struct object" is still too damn large, but it's now less
obviously bloated, and of the remaining fields, only the "util" (which is
not used by most things) is clearly something that should be eventually
discarded.
This shrinks the "git-rev-list --all" memory use by about 2.5% on the
kernel archive (and, perhaps more importantly, on the larger mozilla
archive). That may not sound like much, but I suspect it's more on a
64-bit platform.
There are other remaining inefficiencies (the parent lists, for example,
probably have horrible malloc overhead), but this was pretty obvious.
Most of the patch is just changing the comparison of the "type" pointer
from one of the constant string pointers to the appropriate new TYPE_xxx
small integer constant.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
If your repository have more roots than the remote repository
you ask an object for, the remote upload-pack keeps responding
"ack continue" until it fills up its received-have buffer
(currently 256 entries). Usually this is not a problem because
the requester stops traversing the ancestry chain from the commit
it gets "ack continue" for, but this mechanism does not work as
a roadblock when it traverses down the path to the root the
other side does not have.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Currently, fetched refs are output in the order the remote side
happened to send them. This changes the order to match the
order of refs that were given on the command line. To the
existing core callers (git-fetch and git-clone) this does not
make any difference, but for other Porcelain use, it would be
more intuitive.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This does two things.
* A new flag --reference can be used to name a local repository
that is to be used as an alternate. This is in response to
an inquiry by James Cloos in the message on the list
<m3r74ykue7.fsf@lugabout.cloos.reno.nv.us>.
* A new flag --use-separate-remote stops contaminating local
branch namespace by upstream branch names. The upstream
branch heads are copied in .git/refs/remotes/ instead of
.git/refs/heads/ and .git/remotes/origin file is set up to
reflect this as well. It requires to have fetch/pull update
to understand .git/refs/remotes by Eric Wong to further
update the repository cloned this way.
For the former change, git-fetch-pack is taught a new flag --all
to fetch from all the remote heads. Nobody uses the git-clone-pack
with this change, so we could deprecate the command, but removal
of the command will be left to a separate round.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
- Fix -Wundef -Wold-style-definition warnings
- Make pll_free() static
[jc: original patch by Timo had another unrelated bits:
- Use setenv() instead of putenv()
I'm postponing that part for now.]
Signed-off-by: Timo Hirvonen <tihirvon@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
It used to be that "git-unpack-objects" would give nice percentages, but
now that we don't unpack the initial clone pack any more, it doesn't. And
I'd love to do that nice percentage view in the pack objects downloader
too, but the thing doesn't even read the pack header, much less know how
much it's going to get, so I was lazy and didn't.
Instead, it at least prints out how much data it's gotten, and what the
packing speed is. Which makes the user realize that it's actually doing
something useful instead of sitting there silently (and if the recipient
knows how large the final result is, he can at least make a guess about
when it migt be done).
So with this patch, I get something like this on my DSL line:
[torvalds@g5 ~]$ time git clone master.kernel.org:/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6 clone-test
Packing 188543 objects
48.398MB (154 kB/s)
where even the speed approximation seems to be roughtly correct (even
though my algorithm is a truly stupid one, and only really gives "speed in
the last half second or so").
Anyway, _something_ like this is definitely needed. It could certainly be
better (if it showed the same kind of thing that git-unpack-objects did,
that would be much nicer, but would require parsing the object stream as
it comes in). But this is big step forward, I think.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
If git-fetch-pack was called with out any refspec, it would ask the server
for funny refs. That cannot work, since the funny refs are not marked
as OUR_REF by upload-pack, which just exits with an error.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
While we are at it, give fully spelled --keep to fetch-pack.
Also give --quiet in addition to -q to fetch-pack as well.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Split out the functions that deal with the socketpair after
finishing git protocol handshake to receive the packed data into
a separate file, and use it in fetch-pack to keep/explode the
received pack data. We earlier had something like that on
clone-pack side once, but the list discussion resulted in the
decision that it makes sense to always keep the pack for
clone-pack, so unpacking option is not enabled on the clone-pack
side, but we later still could do so easily if we wanted to with
this change.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
These are whole-tree operations and there is not much point
making them operable from within a subdirectory, but it is easy
to do so, and using setup_git_directory() upfront helps git://
proxy specification picked up from the correct place.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
'git-fetch remote no-such-ref' succeeded without fetching any
ref from the remote. Detect such case and report an error.
Note that this makes 'git-fetch remote master master' to fail,
because the remote branch 'master' matches the first refspec,
and the second refspec is left unmatched, which is detected by
the error checking logic. This is somewhat unintuitive, but
giving the same refspec more than once to git-fetch is useless
in any case so it should not be much of a problem. I'd accept a
patch to change this if somebody cares enough, though.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
One caller of deref_tag() was not careful enough to make sure
what deref_tag() returned was not NULL (i.e. we found a tag
object that points at an object we do not have). Fix it, and
warn about refs that point at such an incomplete tag where
needed.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
When git-fetch-pack gets the remote refs, it does not need to filter them
right away, but it can see which refs are common (taking advantage of the
patch which makes git-fetch-pack not use git-rev-list).
This means that we ask get_remote_heads() to return all remote refs,
including the funny refs, and filtering them with a separate function later.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
The code used to call git-rev-list to enumerate the local revisions.
A disadvantage of that method was that git-rev-list, lacking a
control apart from the command line, would happily enumerate
ancestors of acknowledged common commits, which was just taking
unnecessary bandwidth.
Therefore, do not use git-rev-list on the fetching side, but rather
construct the list on the go. Send the revisions starting from the
local heads, ignoring the revisions known to be common.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This patch concludes the series, which makes
git-fetch-pack/git-upload-pack negotiate a potentially better set of
common revs. It should make a difference when fetching from a repository
with a few branches.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
The code used to call git-rev-list to enumerate the local revisions. A
disadvantage of that method was that git-rev-list, lacking a control apart
from the command line, would happily enumerate ancestors of acknowledged
common commits, which was just taking unnecessary bandwidth.
Therefore, do not use git-rev-list on the fetching side, but rather
construct the list on the go. Send the revisions starting from the local
heads, ignoring the revisions known to be common.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Also Johannes noticed we use parse_object to look up if we know that
object already -- we should just ask the in-core object registry with
lookup_object() for that.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
The previous round to optimize fetch-pack has a small bug that
feeds SHA1^ ("parent commit") before making sure SHA1 is
actually a commit (or a tag that eventually dereferences to a
commit). Also it did not help culling the known-to-be-common
parents if the common one was a merge.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
It was all good and well to check if all remote refs are complete (local
refs or descendants thereof), but we can just as easily use the same
information to avoid sending "want" lines just for the complete objects in
the case that not all remote refs are complete (or their names differ).
Also, git-fetch-pack does not have to ask for descendants of remote refs
which are complete (for now, git-rev-list is told to ignore only the first
parent). That change also eliminates a code path where a popen()ed handle
was not pclose()ed.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
On top of optimization by Linus not to ask refs that already match, we
can walk our refs and not issue "want" for things that are known to be
reachable from them.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
If everything is up-to-date locally, we don't need to even ask for a
pack-file from the remote, or try to unpack it.
This is especially important for tags - since the pack-file common commit
logic is based purely on the commit history, it will never be able to find
a common tag, and will thus always end up re-fetching them.
Especially notably, if the tag points to a non-commit (eg a tagged tree),
the pack-file would be unnecessarily big, just because it cannot any most
recent common point between commits for pruning.
Short-circuiting the case where we already have that reference means that
we avoid a lot of these in the common case.
NOTE! This only matches remote ref names against the same local name,
which works well for tags, but is not as generic as it could be. If we
ever need to, we could match against _any_ local ref (if we have it, we
have it), but this "match against same name" is simpler and more
efficient, and covers the common case.
Renaming of refs is common for branch heads, but since those are always
commits, the pack-file generation can optimize that case.
In some cases we might still end up fetching pack-files unnecessarily, but
this at least avoids the re-fetching of tags over and over if you use a
regular
git fetch --tags ...
which was the main reason behind the change.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This allows the remote side (most notably, upload-pack) to show
additional information without affecting the downloader. Peek-remote
does not ignore them -- this is to make it useful for Pasky's
automatic tag following.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
This is a beginning of resurrecting the multi-head pulling support
for git-fetch-pack command. The git-fetch-script wrapper still
only knows about fetching a single head, without renaming, so it is
not very useful unless you directly call git-fetch-pack itself yet.
It also fixes a longstanding obsolete description of how the command
discovers the list of local commits.
This adds documentation for 'smarter pull' family of commands.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Oh, well.. FC4 has UTF-8 as the default environment, and I applaud
that, but then it sometimes results in these characters that aren't
actually visible as a problem.
"git_path()" returns a static pathname pointer into the git directory
using a printf-like format specifier.
"head_ref()" works like "for_each_ref()", except for just the HEAD.
It returns the result SHA1 on stdout, so you can do
remote=$(git-fetch-pack host:dir branchname)
and it will unpack the objects and "remote" will be the SHA1 name of the
branch on the other side. You can then save that off, or merge it, or
whatever.
It's meant to be used by "git fetch" for the local and ssh case.
It doesn't actually do the fetching now, but it does discover the common
commit point.