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Comment by strkek | Hacker News Reader

The only drawback I see to this approach is that adding a new method is not trivial, and requires recompiling the `go` executable.

Makes it more difficult to implement a handler for the BitTorrent protocol to `go get` from a DHT, just for the sake of mad science.

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That sounds like an incredible idea!

Has anyone tried to do something like this before? I would absolutely run a torrent server to serve up my own and others' open source packages.

To my knowledge it hasn’t been tried. It shouldn’t be too difficult to author a tool to do so, which could itself be made go-gettable. With this you’d avoid the mess of shipping an alternate build of the go tool and all that entails.

Yeah, the more I think about it the easier it seems.

You could probably write "plugins" or shims/wrappers for most package managers out there pretty easily.

And a great MVP would just be the ability to install from a magnet link.

This project was fairly close to that idea:

https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

I think it’s abandoned though.

I read somewhere that big companies use BitTorrent internally to update their codebase.

But yeah, I'd really like for someone to develop a VCS like that (even more if it's in Go, with no Cgo, and under BSD, MIT or Apache license). It'd make distribution, immutability and mirroring so much easier.

There is https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx (based on IPFS instead of torrents, but they work extremely similarly for this use case)

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