I've been toying around with an HTTP server for various things over the past few months and a few weeks ago I came up with the idea of tunneling arbitrary stream protocols over HTTP with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" bodies on both ends. This allowed me to tunnel the git:// protocol among other things over something that may conform to RFC 2616. To facilitate this, curl needed only one minor modification (now in their CVS repository) to make stdin with "-T-" non-blocking: http://cool.haxx.se/cvs.cgi/curl/src/main.c.diff?r1=1.520&r2=1.521 Since git clone already supports proxy commands via GIT_PROXY_COMMAND, I just created a one line shell script to use as GIT_PROXY_COMMAND. No modifications were needed to git itself on either end: cat > /path/to/script <<\EOF #!/bin/sh exec curl --no-buffer -sSfT- http://$1:$2/ EOF chmod +x /path/to/script GIT_PROXY_COMMAND=/path/to/script export GIT_PROXY_COMMAND # Then, to test it on a small project on my server: git clone git://git.bogomips.org:8080/pcu # Of course, a larger project like git should work, too: git clone git://git.bogomips.org:8080/mirrors/git Hopefully it doesn't blow up or die on you, this is only lightly tested. Let me know if you manage to break it permanently. The origin server I'm running for this is the latest release of Unicorn[2], which supports sending a chunked HTTP response as it is receiving a chunked request. Unicorn just dechunks the request and pipes it to git-daemon. When git-daemon writes to stdout, Unicorn just grabs the output and chunks it (via Rack[3] middleware) for the client. This doesn't work in the face of most HTTP-aware proxies[1], so it probably doesn't help those who have trouble accessing git:// servers in the first place... However, this could potentially be useful in places where a proxy providing CONNECT is not available. [1] - I run nginx on port 80 on bogomips.org and nginx (attempts to) fully buffer all requests before proxying it to the backend, so it definitely won't fly here. HTTP proxies are perfectly alright with taking chunked requests/responses and remove chunking on them (or vice versa). [2] - http://unicorn.bogomips.org/ [3] - http://rack.rubyforge.org/ -- Eric Wong -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html