Comment 2 for bug 49989

Interesting suggestion.

When it creates the branch, the sftp server could set a Branch.init_in_progress flag. When the session terminates, it would clear init_in_progress and set pull_now. When the sftp server starts it would clear all init_in_progress flags and set pull_now on the corresponding branches.

To avoid ignoring new data because of abnormally long lived sftp sessions, it would still be necessary to periodically pull all sftp branches, but if an error occurs when pulling a branch which has init_in_progress, it would be silently ignored.

Similarly, the first write operation on an existing branch could set "change_in_progress", that would be treated just as init_in_progress except for the status reporting in the web ui.