Re: [Monotone-devel] ..more notes about .nuskool

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Zbigniew Zagórski wrote:
> Just for curiosity how big databases you've managed to sync ? Is it
> useful for syncing n.v.monotone* branch set ?

Uh.. nuskool isn't quite there, yet, sorry.

With the oldskool netsync, I'm regularly synching a database over 500mb.

> Maybe a little not related opinion.
>
> I've been thinking a lot about all of this while hacking on
> n.v.m.dumb. I know that current dumb tool can be much more faster if
> it would be possible to retrieve complete
> merkle_dir (or anything representing state of the database/project) in
> some fast way. The HTTP time wasn't too important, the most time
> consuming was retrieving/toposorting all revisions (not so bad) and
> all the certs for all revisions (ages).

I would like to bring together nuskool and nvm.dumb. Maybe even
integrate compatibility to download from dumb servers into monotone.

However, the primary point of nuskool is not requiring to build merkle
tries anymore. Instead, it uses a DAG based refinement [1], as do most
other similar VCSes. So nvm.dumb will probably have to adapt as well.

> It's slow also for current netsync protocol so I think there must be
> some idea shift about synchronization. How to synchronize databases
> without retrieving WHOLE of tree and ALL certs.

Well, without a merkle trie, certs will have to be treated differently.
Graydon proposed a DAG based synchronization for the certs as well. This
would involve creating revisions in "cert branches" - somewhat similar
to policy branches. I still need to get my mind around that, but it
sounds very interesting to me. See the IRC log here [2].

Regards

Markus


[1]: Monotone wiki about DAG based refinement:
http://www.venge.net/mtn-wiki/DagBasedRefinement

[2]: Monotone IRC log:
http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/monotone?date=2008-01-31,Thu#l51