> This might be a daft question but could we teach cat-file to check if an > object is available locally and if it is not retrieve just the metadata > from the remote rather than adding a new command to --batch-command? > That way it would be transparent to the user and they would not have to > worry about whether they might be querying a remote object or not. Definitely a good question! If we did this over a large amount of objects and we didn't have those objects locally, then we would have to query for each of them, resulting in a lot of transport overhead. Therefore, I needed to use --batch-command to allow me to query all at once. This also begs the question of why I don't check for the objects locally before querying the server. The intention of my patch assumes that the user querying for object-info knows they don't have the object locally and would therefore like to see the size of an object they could potentially fetch. This could definitely be potential future work (which I should mention in my commit message!)
