Code review comment for lp://staging/~jelmer/bzr/hpss-get-inventories

>> I am a bit concerned that by adding verbs like this, with their own ad hoc
>> record stream-like wire format, that we're growing the maintenance burden
>> unnecessarily, and not reusing improvements everywhere we could.

> +1

I kind of had the same feeling when jelmer started adding a bunch of verbs that were basically replacing a vfs roundtrip by a smart request roundtrip.

BUT

If we stop maintaining these verbs on the server side, the clients will fallback to vfs.

So we introduce different/better verbs, we can remove the old ones in both the server and the client and all but the newest clients can still fallback to vfs.

The net effect is at least to get to a point where the most recent client/server do not use vfs at all.

This sounds like a good incremental step to me.

'reusing improvements everywhere we could' is still valuable but doesn't to block progress.