FWIW, I do believe that you have to have git installed on the other side, and what it is doing at an implementation level is using ssh to run a transient copy o

FWIW, I do believe that you have to have git installed on the other side, and what it is doing at an implementation level is using ssh to run a transient copy of the git daemon backed by that path on the remote machine, which communicates over stdin/stdout--and so over ssh--and which implicitly (due to the EOF) dies when the ssh connection dies. Like, I don't think it is accessing the remote side using mere scp/sftp file-system operations or anything (which would be horribly slow for a number of basic operations and would make cleanly running triggers and the such more annoying).