I don't know anything about dgit yet but regarding this general idea: what you say true from the perspective of your git client but that URI could be a gateway to a decentralized backend. If you're familiar with IPFS, imagine IPFS gateways for git repos. The gateways themselves are centralized but they're just feeders into a decentralized network.
So "decentralized" is a synonym for "distributed"?
Suppose I mount, under /path, some kind of distributed filesystem whose storage is replicated among many servers (for fault tolerance, availability, and performance) and then store a git repo into /path/to/repo.git.
If I clone from this, so that my origin is "file:///path/to/repo.git", is that then a decentralized git remote?
love the discussion here - I'ld like to provide a bit of clarity on the architecture for context.
The `dgit://` protocol that gets registered with the `git-remote-dgit` helper is not in itself a remote resource, but rather a deterministic identity that has been registered with the Tupelo DLT (zonotope provided good details on this below). Therefore the ownership as well as the current state (branches, tags, maybe PRs in the future :), etc) of the remote repo is decentralized away from a single entity (aka GitHub/GitLab) - as the owner, you fully control it, nobody else can modify it - not even the dgit team.
The storage part of your dgit remote is much more on the "distributed" side. We chose sia's skynet because we think it's a great fit for this. However, the actual objects of the repo could be stored anywhere, S3, IPFS, exchanged over bittorrent, or even your local raspberry pi. Regardless of where the git objects live, there still remains a single, trusted, distributed index of your repository on the Tupelo DLT.
It costs "money" (Siacoin tokens) to store data on Sia IIRC, but I don't see any mention on the GitHub repo or elsewhere in this thread about having to pay anything to use this. Is Skynet effectively free?
In most contexts, "IPFS" really just means "self-hosted", because it only works if someone who actually cares about the file (in practice, just the author typically) is seeding it.
For Sia/Skynet, the Sia network is doing the hosting, meaning the file has high uptime even if the uploader does not, and even if nobody else chooses to pin/seed the file.
