Distributed, Asynchronous Git Syncing with NNCP

I have a problem.

I have a directory that I use with org-mode and org-roam. I want it to be synced across multiple machines. I also want to keep the history with git. And, I want to use end-to-end encryption (no storing a plain git repo on a remote server), have a serverless setup, not require any two machines to be up simultaneously, and be resilient in the face of races and conflicts.

Whew.

I’ve tried a number of setups – git-remote-gcrypt on a remote server (fragile), some complicated scripts around a separate repo in syncthing (requires one machine to be “in charge”), etc. They all were subpar.

Then NNCP introdoced asynchronous multicast and I was intrigued.

So, I wrote gitsync-nncp, which uses NNCP to distribute git bundles to all the participating machines. The comprehensive documentation for gitsync-nncp goes into a lot more detail about how it works and what problems it solves. It’s working quite well for me!

8 thoughts on “Distributed, Asynchronous Git Syncing with NNCP

  1. @jtr @debian @kensanata So #NNCP can be used to transport #Usenet news and #email because fundamentally those things can be transported by piping data into the rnews and rmail commands, which fits perfectly with nncp-exec. In fact, a predecessor to NNCP, #UUCP, was the way email and news often flowed in the early days, and this support is mostly still there even in modern servers. It takes just a bit of tweaking to make it use NNCP instead. 8/
    NNCP
    email
    usenet
    uucp

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