That's interesting - I believe it is used to continue partial downloads in dumb http mode. Technically, you can figure out the bytes needed out of the packfile

That's interesting - I believe it is used to continue partial downloads in dumb http mode. Technically, you can figure out the bytes needed out of the packfile from the index that is downloaded, so I suppose it is possible. However, it would still be way slower than smart-http, because you would have to walk the refs one by one on the client side - one GET, figure out the next object, another GET, etc. With smart-http, you do a short back and forth until the server can figure out the entire list of objects you need and then build a custom packfile for you. And it still wouldn't help push in any way.