On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Pierre-Yves Chibon <pingou@pingoured.fr> wrote:
grok-dumb-pull seems to be the way to go in the current environment. However I
have a couple of questions:
- has there been any thoughts on trying to get grokmirror included in github as
  one of the hooks they provide by default? This would reduce their bandwith
  usage for all the project that, like us, would like to mirror their github
  repo elsewhere.

I've not approached them for anything like this, but I would imagine a single manifest file would not work at all for all of github's repositories. The largest collection we currently manage with grokmirror is 5,500 repositories and though it does admirably well, it's getting to the point where parsing/writing the manifest file is taking upwards of a second. They could probably generate a manifest file per user, but not a single manifest for all the repositories they host.

- One thing that isn't clear to me is how the manifest.js is made available. It
  is just provided at a specified URL or is it in fact included in the git repo?

It's made available outside git repositories as a simple http download. This way we can make use of an extremely lightweight HTTP with "if-newer-than" header and bail out early if the remote manifest hasn't changed.
 
There is one more thing I'd like to see in grokmirror, but I'll make a
pull-request for it ;-)

I see it. I'll try to move on it shortly. We need a 0.4.0 out, and it's probably the last big change that would go into it.

Best,
--
Konstantin Ryabitsev
LinuxFoundation.org
Montréal, Québec