Re: Distributed Debian Distribution Development

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Yaroslav Halchenko
<debian@onerussian.com> wrote:
> Just - Wow... thanks!
>
> Hopefully digesting of this tasty post would not cause too much of farting ;-)

 :)

> seems might be worth adding (if I am not missing the point), then the
> concept of "derivatives" would then converge finally to a more
> digestible, more manageable, and thus more robust mechanism of
> branches... ?

 ahh, you're still using "git": i'll be doing nothing more fancy than
creating a "git-remote-helper" which will add a protocol gitp2p:// or
gpp:// or something like that.

 so you'll still need to understand the concept of branches and
branching: it's just that you'd be able to grab them from peers rather
than being reliant on a central server.

 imagine a situation where you meet a fellow debian developer(s) and
you both(all) happen to be on holiday or just... somewhere where
connectivity is patchy.  i envisage a situation where both (or all)
publish their own trackers, and they can simply share whatever bits of
git repositories they (individually) happened to be "most interested
in, personally", with everyone else.

for example, one person happens to have an OCD-fueled interest in
keeping up-to-date with every single mailing list, whilst another
happens to be interested in some obscure piece of software.  everybody
collaborates, does loads of packages, GPG signs them, commits them to
each others' git repositories, they all say bye bye nice meeting you,
get on planes or goats and the VERY first person who happens to have
internet access does a "git push", wham, everyones' packages are
uploaded/available to the rest of the world.  including those people
who shared them originally, but they have the git commit refs already
_in_ their database, so when _they_ get online as well, they
automatically become "seeds" as part of the wider git-bittorrent
network for those packages.

so... yeah.  it's a little... radical, but actually nothing more than
a mind-shift rather than any actual significant coding.

l.