Subject: Re: git pack/unpack over bittorrent - works!

From: Ted Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2010 18:41:39 -0400

On Sat, Sep 04, 2010 at 09:00:56PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> > Which brings me back to my original question --- what problem exactly
> > are you trying to solve?  What's the scenario?
> 
> i described those in prior messages.  to summarise: they're basically
> reduction of dependence on centralised infrastructure, and to allow
> developers to carry on doing code-sprints using bugtrackers, wikis and
> anything else that can be "git-able" as its back-end, _even_ in the
> cases where there is little or absolutely no bandwidth... and _still_
> sync up globally once any one of the developers gets back online.

So at all of the code sprints I've been at, the developers all have
locally very good bandwidth between each other.  And if they don't
have wifi, what *will* they have?  In the example you gave, you never
were able to bring up a local area network, because you had one or two
lamers who couldn't even do wifi in adhoc mode.  Hell, even if you had
to hook up someone's laptop using an RS-232 line and PPP, that would
be plenty of bandwidth for git.  So you weren't specific enough in
your scenario.  How could it happen?  And is it really all that realistic?

Even if it did, it wouldn't be hard to just set up a git server on one
of the laptop.  What makes peer2peer so critically important in this
use case?  (And no, carrier pigeons are not particularly realistic for
a code sprint....)

							- Ted