Over the last few weeks i've been working on a seperate python nntp project. But decided that it would be fun to make it usable with git-annex.
The code is almost complete. One major feature left(make it usable without a mysql/sqlite database, and without fetching headers). And of course a lot of bugfixes.
I'm wondering if there is any interest in this special remote hook.
The thought is, buy unlimited usenet account, and you can have a git-annex repository without any upper size limit. You want 100GB, well that'll be 10$ a month, want 100000GB, well that'll be 10$ a month.
Of course there are plenty of caveats(retention on server, it is doubtfull the data will stay up for more than 4 years.). Because the code is in python3 i had to use a lot of external tools (uudeview, par2, ydecode/yydecode) and parse their output. Which is a horrid horrid solution. Since the code is nearing "beta" stage i might see if i can improve on that(possibly with ctypes), if there is any interest.
Currently working on freebsd, ubuntu, debian, mac os x(10.7, not tested in 10.8)
The last feature to be done (and this is UUUUUGLY) is to make it get nzb files from a source like this: http://nzbindex.nl/search/?q=GPGHMACSHA (yes, that is my git-annex repo) instead of from a mysql database.
So, this is a call to see if anyone is interested, and if anyone proficient in *NIX want to test it out.
Sincerely Tobias
I think it's a neat idea. I can't see using it for my own data due to retention, but if I had a use case where I wanted to spread data around and didn't care if it vanished after X months, I can see using it.
I think you should publish the details, if getting it to a state others can use is not too much work,
Only played a tiny bit with this since the initial post.
I've decided that sql backend should be dropped entirely. Mostly the SQL backend was there because the code does something else entirely, and this was just a test.
But since there has been no interest it will probably take ages before i actually get this finished