git bundler service

git bundler service

[Tomas Carnecky]

I do a fair amount of end-user support in our official IRC channel and 
every now and then someone with a really slow or unreliable internet 
connection stumbles over the fact that git can't resume clones. In the 
past I would real quick clone the repo and make a bundle for them (if 
the repo was public). Now I made a service out of it: 
https://bundler.caurea.org/. The site is really simple: you enter a git 
url and after a while you'll be able to download the bundle. Bundles are 
cached for a week. Each page has instructions how to convert the bundle 
into a git repository as you would get it via a regular git clone 
(example: https://bundler.caurea.org/bundle/4e709b2ab3f4d18746000002).

In theory it should be possible use the service from the commandline, 
for example to create a wrapper around git clone which does all the 
things automagically. If somebody is interested in doing that, please 
contact me and I'll send you the API documentation.

tom

Re: git bundler service

[Junio C Hamano]

Tomas Carnecky <tom@dbservice.com> writes:

> I do a fair amount of end-user support in our official IRC channel and
> every now and then someone with a really slow or unreliable internet
> connection stumbles over the fact that git can't resume clones. In the
> past I would real quick clone the repo and make a bundle for them (if
> the repo was public). Now I made a service out of it:
> https://bundler.caurea.org/. The site is really simple: you enter a
> git url and after a while you'll be able to download the
> bundle.

Interesting, as I was talking with others on a related solution to a
similar issue of priming the well for large clones.

The basic idea is to allow a site automatically to redirect fresh-clone
clients to a URL to HTTP reachable mirror network, and force them to grab
a bundle, extract it and then re-contact the server for only incremental
updates relative to the bundle (and of course that exchange would happen
inside the updated client without end-user intervention).