Re:Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub
by giancarlostoro on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @05:40AM
(#17245632)
Heck even torrents which are distributed needed a central server to connect through for ages. There's definitely a benefit to having a central server that aids the sea of clients / servers to communicate.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Aren't torrents using DHT?
Re:Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub
by tomsmeding on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @05:58AM
(#17245719)
For which they need a number of central servers. These server do not do anything with the content, but they serve to announce to any new client what other clients are there, so that these new clients can start setting up their network. Once that's done, the new clients can discover the other nodes through the nodes they just connected to, and the servers have done their job.
But the servers are necessary, as far as I know, unless you want to enumerate IP addresses and scan for open ports. Which is going to be interesting with IPv6.
Re:Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub
by ahauxuueei on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @06:18AM
(#17245803)
You are mistaken. DHT is decentralized.
Re:Gitea – Alternative to GitLab and GitHub
by vertex-four on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @06:37AM
(#17245888)
The bootstrap problem isn’t generally solved though - a new client needs to know a set of other clients to connect to, same with a client that’s been turned off for a while and whose cached set of other clients aren’t online. This is solved by an always-on set of clients that these clients are statically configured with.
In theory, yes, if they go down, you could configure your client to point at another well-known client, though.