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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

What’s stopping you from making torrents of your repos now?

(Not as a rhetorical question; I don’t quite understand your vision, so I’m hoping you’ll clarify the usage.)

They are probably talking about a "serverless" bittorrent. Some kind of Git-over-DHT. It would require this to be accepted: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0050.html (Decentralized Mutable Torrent)

Ooh, I really like this idea! A decentralized form of pub-sub based git sounds fantastic. Of course, much of what makes github et.al. desirable, is the extras on top. Pull Requests, Issues, Wiki, search, etc. Making a “local first” decentralized GitHub would be much work.

Is it? I imagine you only really have to build a different persistence backend. Then, everything else can go through that.

Git in itself is designed to be distributed.

Check out Fossil SCM, from the creator of SQLite.

The torrents would be snapshots of the repo at a particular point in time. Updates couldn't be fetched through the torrent via git pull.

I'd assume that op wants a torrent that can be pushed/pulled from.

git is decentralized by design. you dont need bittorrent.

No. With BitTorrent, I can tell a client to go fetch this torrent or hash (magnet link) and it can do that without any specific hardcoded server. Centralized trackers help but there’s always the DHT. With git you need to give the client an exact host, which can be gone for any number of reasons.

So then just like with music and movies, I'll get letters from law firms for hosting illegal git repos via BitTorrent.

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