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GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

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Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#91

Post by braaap »

Rhapso wrote: post #70
rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

Check out IPFS ( http://ipfs.io/ ) You can use it for git repos essentially out of the box by uploading your repo. It is made of content addressed chunks which will get re-used on each re-upload.

I just checked this out thanks to your link. Awesome. ipfs solves a whole class of problems - distributed git repos being just one of them. Great stuff.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#92

Post by rakoo »

rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

Peers don't have to seed packfiles the way we're used to for "traditional" seeding of movies or music; these packfiles actually represent transition from one commit to another (instead of "all content from beginning to now"), so they are inherently ephemeral. They don't even need to be kept on the disk, because they will be generated on the fly every time a client is interested.

The DAG-osity of git really helps here (because you only have to transfer what's really needed), and the "immutability" of git helps because if your project is popular and you update your branch, everyone will want to go from the old commit to the new commit, so everyone can share the diff between them directly.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#93

Post by rakoo »

minot wrote: post #60
rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

> The un-updateability of torrents is something that seems to seriously limit it's use. I am not involved with the development of torrents at all but (please bear with me until the end) my initial reaction is that we should think of the lack of ability of torrents to update as a feature and not as a bug. Perhaps if ability of torrents to update is a concern then it warrants a new peer to peer protocol? (Please note t…

> Perhaps if ability of torrents to update is a concern then it warrants a new peer to peer protocol?

There is a new peer to peer protocol, it's even an IETF draft, it's called PPSP and is full of nice stuff:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protocol-12

https://github.com/libswift/libswift

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#94

Post by mcdonji »

arxpoetica wrote: post #19

Major fan of this idea. But how does one address the GUI challenges presented by leaving GitHub behind? It can't be understated that GitHub provides an amazing (communal/social) user experience.

Do the same thing you did for the Gittorrent. A GUI client that runs a torrent of a php file that connects to a torrent of a database file. You just need to always be connecting to the latest and greatest.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#95

Post by ChuckMcM »

rektide wrote: post #38

Lovely work! We ask for the commit we want and connect to a node with BitTorrent, but once connected we conduct this Smart Protocol negotiation in an overlay connection on top of the BitTorrent wire protocol, in what’s called a BitTorrent Extension. Then the remote node makes us a packfile and tells us the hash of that packfile, and then we start downloading that packfile from it and any other nodes who are seeding i…

I agree it is really stellar. The billion dollar concept for me though is encrypted repo torrents. Imagine a group of servers that are hosting encrypted chunks which form the basis of a homomorphic encryption protocol for distribution using forward error correction to allow recovery of the deltas if n of m components of that delta can be recovered. Basically if you have the key you can pull out of this amorphous cloud your source code, and if you don't have the key you won't even know it is out there.

I started building a toy version of this about 5 years ago but got distracted by work. Essentially the repo key encrypted the packfile, the storage reliability layer used its another key to encrypt the chunks. The latter key would find the chunks, with enough reliability to re-create the encrypted packfile, which the latter key could decrypt and apply to your repo.

A very fun problem in distributed systems and data structures.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#96

Post by comex »

If a version of this with friendly name support is released, I will mirror all my active GitHub repositories there.

If someone builds on this, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, to make a decentralized service that mimics 'social' functionality such as issues and pull requests, I will strongly consider using it instead of GitHub (depending on the UI, stability, etc.).

I don't even have any particularly popular repos, so there is no real reason for anyone to care about the above, but, y'know, HN comments approving of the idea don't necessarily translate into actual interest in the product, so now you know there's at least one person in the latter category. :)

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#97

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

js2 wrote: post #26
sytse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab CEO here, thanks for mentioning us as the open source alternative. We think in the short term multiple organizations hosting their own GitLab is the way to go. It is hard to do issues and pull/merge requests in a decentralized way (the OP is impressive but it shows distributed git instead of distributed GitHub). I would like to see federated merge requests http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/sugge…

It is hard to do issues and pull/merge requests in a decentralized way ...Over the web... I mean, Git and Linux are developed via email lists, which is a decentralized way of sending pull/merge requests, isn't it? I guess you could argue the mailing list is hosted on a server, fine. So then fine, usenet. Yeah, email and nntp are old crufty technologies and there are obviously advantages to having a web based interfac…

Why would you want to have a web interface? The web stack is crufty as hell, and the web has the one major problem that it forces everyone to use the same UI for accessing a service. With email, for example, clueless users can get by with some simple webmail interface, but that does not prevent me from managing my mails efficiently with mutt. The standardization of UIs instead of protocls and data formats is one of the worst regressions in IT in recent years, IMO.

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#98

Post by [deleted] »

cjbprime wrote: post #89
shea256 wrote: post #86

Love this. The post mentions using the blockchain for unique username registration and mapping to public key hashes, and as it turns out there's a project I and others have been working on that does exactly this called Blockstore. Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/namesystem/blockstore The way it works is there's a mapping between a unique name and a hash in the blockchain, and then…

(GitTorrent author here.) That's great, thanks! I should just use this (preferably with the DHT I'm already using to look up Git commits) instead of reimplementing myself. What do you think about the idea of making pluggable modules to connect Blockstore with web frameworks (Django, Rails), without the framework/website authors having to get involved in understanding Bitcoin themselves?

[deleted]

Re: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

#100

Post by jMyles »

nilved wrote: post #51
cxxv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy doesn't hold up, as (for one) we have society and plants don't. I'm glad that child porn is illegal (which is usually distributed in files), as it makes the world safer for children. Also: some plants are serious jerks.

If pi goes on forever, it contains any and all representations of child porn that could exist. The first person to calculate pi that far will be breaking the law. No, that doesn't make sense, nor does any sort of information being illegal. What does make sense is to legislate the actions that can generate that data, or the misappropriation of that data.

Hear hear. This is an easy-to-understand and concise thought experiment; use it often!
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