[HN Gopher] Radicle: Peer-to-Peer Collaboration with Git (2024)
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       Radicle: Peer-to-Peer Collaboration with Git (2024)
        
       Author : emreb
       Score  : 78 points
       Date   : 2025-10-01 08:41 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lwn.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | (2024)
       | 
       | https://radicle.xyz/
       | 
       | Some various discussions:
       | 
       |  _Radicle 1.0 - A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub_
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41509713
       | 
       |  _Jujutsu and Radicle_
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900455
        
       | gradientsrneat wrote:
       | Issue tracking support is great. I hope they add web login (maybe
       | through ActivityPub and/or OAuth), and a wiki tab. This would put
       | it on par with Fossil, which is similarly decentralized but has a
       | bespoke version control which makes rewriting history and other
       | git workflows difficult.
        
         | graemep wrote:
         | Fossil is primarily a DVCS, like git, but aimed at a different
         | set of users (e.g. smaller projects) and includes decentralised
         | tickets etc., but in practice it is easiest to have a
         | centralised server. Its easy to run your own, but there is
         | hosting available for Fossil: https://chiselapp.com/
         | 
         | Redicale seems much more decentralised. Rather than making it
         | easy to run your own server it eliminates the server
         | altogether. A more radical approach :).
         | 
         | it would probably be easier to build something like Radicale on
         | top of Fossil because all that is missing is a way of finding
         | to peers, and connecting to them without a server (e.g. from
         | dynamic IPs, behind NAT etc.).
        
       | Bolwin wrote:
       | Windows support yet?
       | 
       | Ah well
        
         | baobun wrote:
         | Windows is increasingly less of a viable platform for, well,
         | anything. Time to pick a distro.
        
           | jayd16 wrote:
           | I don't know what it is about git but it really brings out
           | the "Nuh uh, your use-case is wrong" talking points.
        
           | pigeons wrote:
           | I think you can pick from most of them via wsl2.
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | I think they're focusing on developers, most of which are
         | either planning a move to something else, wishing they could
         | move or have already left.
        
           | Bolwin wrote:
           | 50% of devs use windows.
           | 
           | Personally, what dev related motivation I had to move to
           | Linux disappeared when wsl got decent.
           | 
           | That said, 90% of my work is still in windows proper, so any
           | universal tool like git related needs to support it to be any
           | use.
           | 
           | And if not me, anyone else you're collaborating with.
        
             | pessimizer wrote:
             | The motivation you had to move to Linux evaporated when you
             | started regularly using Linux, and it's important to
             | consider Windows developers, for whom it's now easy to use
             | Linux without completely moving to Linux.
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | That feels like a contradiction; either WSL is a good
             | solution and you can just run radicle there, or it isn't.
        
               | jayd16 wrote:
               | Good enough in a pinch to prevent a switch but not good
               | enough to do all your work in the wsl filesystem.
        
               | packetlost wrote:
               | WSL... filesystem? Either way, I firmly disagree, there
               | are not many cases where I've been unable to do dev work
               | on WSL. Only when I need particularly weird / specific
               | networking or hardware (ie. GPU, which might work now)
               | have I had significant problems.
        
               | jayd16 wrote:
               | File IO from windows into the wsl disk and vice-versa is
               | significantly slower so it's not great to, for example,
               | use wsl git on a project living under your windows user
               | directory or visual studio on a directory under your wsl
               | home.
               | 
               | I think they're just using FUSE to make it work but don't
               | quote me on that part.
        
         | rirze wrote:
         | I would advise using WSL.
        
       | eternityforest wrote:
       | This seems like one of the most interesting P2P projects out
       | there.
       | 
       | It seems like it could be a really nice backend sync engine for
       | offline first apps, aside from the lack of official support for
       | Android.
        
       | qudat wrote:
       | Cool project, I'm always weary by projects that take so much dev
       | time to build out, but I've been keeping my eye on this one.
       | 
       | I've been thinking about git collaboration slightly differently
       | from the rest of the code forges. I think git collaboration could
       | be easier for a huge chunk of use cases.
       | 
       | I don't see why we necessarily need code forges for
       | collaboration. We just need something a little better than
       | emailing patches around.
       | 
       | It's why I've been building a pastebin super charged for git
       | collaboration. It's still very much a wip but for anyone curious:
       | https://pr.pico.sh
        
         | vhantz wrote:
         | All your work at pico.sh never cease to amaze me!
        
       | pessimizer wrote:
       | I'll get into radicle when they make a properly namespaced p2p
       | alternative to crates.io out of it. I'll make it my religion. If
       | I'm going to have all of these packages on my system at all
       | times, I can continually dedicate 50-100K of my bandwidth to
       | sharing them; everyone could, really.
       | 
       | Rust has a Microsoft dependency in crates.io. We all have a
       | Microsoft dependency with github.
       | 
       | edit: iirc, they're extreme CoC warriors and crypto-connected, so
       | that's going to limit the reach of the project.
        
         | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
         | > I'll make it my religion.
         | 
         | Hey mate, these are just tools _but_ I love the energy I
         | suppose.
         | 
         | Pretty sure that you can hack something like this though
         | 
         | Just checked and saw this https://github.com/moriturus/ktra
         | 
         | Now its been a long time since I last checked at radicle but if
         | they are using checksum as the thing then you can definitely
         | hack through something with ktra which pulls the content from
         | radicle nodes and gives it back I suppose
         | 
         | not sure what you mean by namespaced p2p thing mate, at best
         | maybe we could have something like nostr in an ideal world
         | where we sort things through on time and sort of but that is
         | really finnicky, I have worked on something similar but that
         | would involve crypto which I or you also don't want to involve
         | it seems.
         | 
         | The best idea could be a sort of lookup table that can be
         | operated by rust foundation etc. which just links names to
         | their hashes etc., iirc nix can definitely do something similar
         | with nix flakes in the sense that they also follow the hash
         | based approach but don't take my word for it as I am not sure
         | and nix is also not the point of this discussion.
         | 
         | If this is something that you are really passionate about,
         | maybe you should give it a go! Have a nice day!
        
       | udev4096 wrote:
       | Love radicle! Excellent docs, great UI, easy-to-use cli and it's
       | all written in Rust. Have been running a public node recently:
       | https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.ext4.xyz
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-03 23:01 UTC)