I’m finally releasing my synchronisation application »brig« which is build on-top of IPFS in version 0.2.0.
It has been a bumpy road development-wise and it took me longer than anticipated, since development
turned out to be quite exhausting. It’s still in some sort of open beta phase (it’s 80% finished!),
but unless you trust it all your files it shouldn’t do any harm. It has quite a few rough edges,
but now it needs YOU (yes, you!) to make it past the beta phase.
What is brig?
If you’re wondering what the heck »brig« is, here’s a line from the docs:
»brig is a distributed & secure file synchronization tool with version control. It is based on IPFS, written in Go and will feel familiar to git users.«
The development of brig has reached a point where it does not make any sense
anymore to develop it without any help from the community. I hope to find some
users (read: crash dummies) that help me see issues with the current design of
brig, its ongoing development and my possible tunnel vision. I’m of course also
happy with any help regarding development, be it pull requests or discussions.
There are currently many areas that deserve to be worked on:
Validate how IPFS is used and fix any bad usage patterns.
Error handling regarding remotes and network timeouts.
Performance in transferring files can have big timeouts.
Making progress information available when “downloading” a file.
Feature: Live-changes through PubSub. The base for this feature is already implemented.
Performance is currently really a constraint to make it a smooth sail.
A lot of brig was developed while commuting in the train, therefore I spend more time on
offline operations than on fiddling with network setups (try that while sitting in a train ).
I’m sure you guys will find quite a lot for improvement, especially regarding transfer speed.
Enough talk, go to the documentation and see if »brig« is interesting to you.
Looking forward to any feedback or help,
~Chris
P.S: Feel free to email me at “ed.enilno@bihas” (reversed for spam protection) for any questions.
Anything that should be visible in public (like bug reports etc.) should go to the issue tracker.
Hi Chris @sahib , thanks for the great effort on brig!
One specific question: Does it work on OSX already?
From the official documentation, I only get this:
“Implement alternative to fuse: FUSE currently only works on Linux and is therefore not usable outside of that.”
I did not test it on OSX. I tried making FUSE optional with the use of Go’s build tags though,
so it’s worth to just trying to compile it and see if it breaks. If not, I encourage to open an issue on GitHub.
“Implement alternative to fuse: FUSE currently only works on Linux and is therefore not usable outside of that.”
I currently only list Linux there, since it is the only platform I can test on, since I don’t down any OSX compatible device.
For everything else I have to rely on input from the community.
PS: IPFS FUSE supports MAC OSX through OSXFUSE
IPFS actually use the same library (bazil/fuse). So it might be relatively easy to support OSX.
PS: go get … didn’t work in my environment, and i tried to git clone it directly. Not sure whether they are somehow different.
No idea about that. But might be related to slow/flaky internet connections. Does not look to me like it’s brig or even Go related (that’s only a gut feeling though).
Which gave something as below when trying to mount:
Currently the fuse mount is only built on linux, so this is kinda expected. Other platforms will only build a stub that will return the error you saw above on every call. I just enabled it to be build on other platforms. Please try again after a git pull.
Conclusion so far: Not able to fully compile/install successfully.
Currently the fuse mount is only built on linux, so this is kinda expected. Other platforms will only build a stub that will return the error you saw above on every call. I just enabled it to be build on other platforms. Please try again after a git pull.
Just tried with a new go get(which worked this time in a faster connection), but one new error unfortunately.
).
Failed to mount: brig was compiled without fuse support