In order to protect the privacy of objects that have been removed from
history but may not yet have been pruned, git-upload-archive avoids
serving archives for commits and trees that are not reachable from the
repository’s refs. However, because calculating object reachability is
computationally expensive, git-upload-archive implements a stricter
but easier-to-check set of rules:
-
Clients may request a commit or tree that is pointed to directly by
a ref. E.g., git archive --remote=origin v1.0.
-
Clients may request a sub-tree within a commit or tree using the
ref:path syntax. E.g., git archive --remote=origin v1.0:Documentation.
-
Clients may not use other sha1 expressions, even if the end
result is reachable. E.g., neither a relative commit like master^
nor a literal sha1 like abcd1234 is allowed, even if the result
is reachable from the refs.
Note that rule 3 disallows many cases that do not have any privacy
implications. These rules are subject to change in future versions of
git, and the server accessed by git archive --remote may or may not
follow these exact rules.
If the config option uploadArchive.allowUnreachable is true, these
rules are ignored, and clients may use arbitrary sha1 expressions.
This is useful if you do not care about the privacy of unreachable
objects, or if your object database is already publicly available for
access via non-smart-http.