built-in support for the `file` protocol

[Byron]

Currently gitoxide relies on shelling this out to the git upload-pack binary which isn't necessarily available on all systems. Instead, we must implement the server side of the fetch operation ourselves and use it.

Key Features

• Shallow support
  • Cargo supports shallow clones, and ideally these also work locally just like when using git
• Protocol V2
  • Probably V1 can be skipped

[NobodyXu]

Looking forward to this, it would be great if gix can support --local to use hardlinks to avoid copying .git or --shared to avoid copying any objects at all when dealing with local repositories.

[Byron]

I agree, and it's so low-hanging that I might even do that just to warm up with the topic.

[weihanglo]

Sorry I didn't quite follow the recent updates in Gitoxide. Do we still shell out to git-upload-pack today?

[Byron]

Yes, that's the case. No work was done in that direction.

[weihanglo]

Yeah thanks for the info. I asked because I was wondering in Cargo if we can stabilize the shallow-clone support with the caveat of no native file protocol support (or just fallback to non-shallow)

[Byron]

Yeah thanks for the info. I asked because I was wondering in Cargo if we can stabilize the shallow-clone support with the caveat of no native file protocol support (or just fallback to non-shallow)

I see - in the fallback case file:// would probably be served by git2, and then shallow isn't possible. Probably that's alright as shallow will be most useful when the URL isn't local.