5.9 Introduction to Responses

After a command which expects a response, the server sends however many of the following responses are appropriate. The server should not send data at other times (the current implementation may violate this principle in a few minor places, where the server is printing an error message and exiting—this should be investigated further).

Any set of responses always ends with ‘error’ or ‘ok’. This indicates that the response is over.

The responses Checked-in, New-entry, Updated, Created, Update-existing, Merged, and Patched are refered to as file updating responses, because they change the status of a file in the working directory in some way. The responses Mode, Mod-time, and Checksum are referred to as file update modifying responses because they modify the next file updating response. In no case shall a file update modifying response apply to a file updating response other than the next one. Nor can the same file update modifying response occur twice for a given file updating response (if servers diagnose this problem, it may aid in detecting the case where clients send an update modifying response without following it by a file updating response).