Re: [Monotone-devel] announcing preliminary "dumb server" support for monotone

[Zbynek Winkler]

I've just started to take a look at this...

Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> I finally got tired of people complaining that monotone couldn't be
> used in funky situations where running a special-purpose daemon was
> too hard, and decided to do something about it.  Branch
> net.venge.monotone.dumb has some preliminary code in python that can:
>  dump a monotone database into an opaque filesystem representation
>  import a monotone database from such an opaque filesystem
>    representation
>  synchronize two such opaque filesystem representations over generic
>    transports.  I've written backends for local filesystem
>    (read/write), SFTP (read/write, requires paramiko+patches,
>    included), and HTTP and FTP (read-only, requires urlgrabber, not
>    included).  Adding new backends is quite straightforward, there's
>    a little abstract interface you plug in.
>  updates a monotone db on the fly while 
> It has hugely rough corners ATM -- there's no command line interface,
> the rollback support isn't _quite_ right, it's slow on large dbs, no
> pipelining (should help speed a lot), 
Hmm. I quite didn't get the picture until I tried it ;). I didn't have 
the patience to wait for the local do_export to finish on the monotone 
database... But the speed seems to be (unfortunately) comparable to the 
verification of the incomming changesets when doing regular pull. BTW: 
What is the limiting factor of the verification step? Does it do some 
sorting?

> it can't push to FTP yet, not a
> proper python package.  Oh, and I just noticed that it doesn't include
> pubkeys in the data to synchronize, oops.
>  
Could it have something to do with the fact that there seems to be no 
'automate keys' anymore? It prints the help message instead... I tried 
to use 'list keys' instead. BTW why does the output differ from the 
other 'list *'? Anyway, this could help:

in monotone.py:
   def key_names(self):
       ids = []
       for line in self.run_monotone(["list", "keys"]).split("\n"):
           if line == "" or line == "[public keys]":
               continue
           if line == "[private keys]":
               break
           ids.append(line.split(" ")[1])
       return ids

> OTOH, it supports monotone's full sync semantics (multiple people can
> push to the same "repo", you can have backup "repos" and sync with
> them indiscriminately, etc.), and should be reasonably efficient (it
> uses merkle tries to do low-overhead set synchronization).  Won't be
> as fast as netsync, or as flexible (whoever puts up the repo gets to
> choose what branches are included, you don't get to pick on the fly
> like for netsync), but might be handy for some people...
>  
How do you pick what branches are included? Doesn't it always export the 
whole database? I was surprised to find out that it does not 
differentiate between files, changesets etc.

Zbynek

--
http://zw.matfyz.cz/     http://robotika.cz/
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic