[Monotone-devel] Unix domain sockets

[William Uther]

Hi all,

  I was looking at the "dumb pull" code again, and decided that was  
non-trivial to make useful for beginner end users.  At the same time  
I live in a world of firewalls and so I can't run netsync on its own  
port.  Finally, the ssh:// transport scheme locks the db, making it  
inappropriate for large scale use.

  My latest approach is to make a new transport scheme; ssh+ux://  
and is in the branch: net.venge.monotone.local-sockets.  The server  
is started once and listens on a unix domain socket (addressed  
through the file system on the server):

mtn serve --db=myDB.mtn --no-transport-auth --bind-local-socket=/a/ 
path/i/can/use

A client then connects by opening an ssh connection and uses the  
"socat" command to connect the unix socket to stdio:

mtn --db=localDB.mtn pull ssh+ux://host/a/path/i/can/use "*"

Multiple clients can connect at the same time, and they all work  
correctly.

Implementation:

  The changes are quite small.  Netxx already handles local domain  
sockets.  All I had to do was introduce a way to pass the path  
through.  And I had to change the standard lua hooks to make the  
client side use the scheme.  The only issue at the moment is that  
this requires "socat" which is not as common as one might like.

Thoughts?

Will           :-}