[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="anarcat"
 avatar="http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/4ad594c1e13211c1ad9edb81ce5110b7"
 subject="late to the party"
 date="2018-03-12T13:50:33Z"
 content="""
eh... i look elsewhere for a week and you design another line
protocol! ;) so I guess it's too late to do anything to change this,
but I wanted to share that similar efforts are being done over the
backup software world, in particular in [restic][],
which is working with the [rclone][] project to implement an abstract
get/pull mechanism to store blobs, a lot like what git-annex needs to
be doing.

they wrote this using a binary protocol for speed (it's basically RPC
at this point) and I encouraged them to at least use a standard one
(they use protobufs + HTTP2 AKA gRPC, iirc, and it works over
stdin/out). you might find the  [full thread][] interesting... it
would be great if git-annex would support this natively instead of
rolling its own protocol, because it would mean it could talk with
other services like rclone or restic servers out of the box, without
*those* endpoints having to implement yet another custom protocol.

but yeah, i'm way too late it seems. figured you might find it
interesting anyways... congrats on the performance improvements!

[restic]: https://restic.net
[rclone]: https://rclone.org/
[full thread]: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1561
"""]]