I wanted (and still want to) look into the code of I2P. And while I have cloned it for myself, I have been browsing around several times already and also came to ask the “why monotone instead of git” question …

But before we come to that, how I started. A list of monotone servers is made available by killyourtv. However, you will need monotone, to access these. But killyourtv also offers some git repositories. These include mirrors of some projects, including I2P itself. And these git-repositories are browseable without having to install anything.

So that’s where I took some first looks. Not going deep and really into it, but knowing where to find the sources, is kind of the first step, right? I also looked into the code of I2P Bote. This is how I found out, that HungryHobo seems to be gone or something. I was still waiting for the I2P Bote mail to him/her get delivered ;)

But yeah, being a bit familiar with git and GitHub (and really liking those), I couldn’t help but go and ask why monotone is used for I2P. Don’t want to quote IRC here, but it seems the developers have already considered moving to git, however there seems to be one blocking problem with git (see bunch of links on bottom). Problems with git? Hadn’t heard that before and kept bothering the guys with questions. Turns out that git doesn not support resuming a download, so if the connection is interrupted it will start from scratch each time. In I2P probably a problem indeed.

This kept bothering me somehow, like in “whaaat? git is not good?” ;) I had searched for solutions but mostly found older stuff. Until I now hit GitTorrent (see link at bottom). This combines git with BitTorrent, although the Torrent in this seems more interesting to me than the Bit. What I mean is, being able to pull larger downloads from a git repo by using Torrents (which support resume quite fine I suppose), would probably solve the existing problem. Now in I2P we wouldn’t need to use the Bitcoin network, but that might be a minor change?

I’d like to do an installation of GitLab (OpenSource project to run ones own GitHub, see last link at bottom) to run on i2p. But it seems like a larger project that is not easily done. But having a “nice” GitHub-style site here would be nice. And for things would get easier if the actual development would be based on git. Don’t know how many think the same her, but seeing how popular GitHub is I guess quite some.

ClearNet Links:

  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14738219/how-to-resume-a-git-pull-clone-after-a-hung-up-unexpectedly
  • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3954852/how-to-complete-a-git-clone-for-a-big-project-on-an-unstable-connection
  • https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SoC2008Ideas#Restartable_Clone
  • http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/55298
  • http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/How-to-resume-broke-clone-td7600001.html
  • http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Transfer-Protocols
  • https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
  • https://about.gitlab.com/