A deep dive into Git remote helpers, the protocol that lets Git talk to arbitrary storage backends. Covers how the capability negotiation and import/fetch protocol works, motivated by a proposed git-remote-swh helper for cloning from Software Heritage archives using content-addressed SWHIDs. Includes a curated survey of existing remote helpers spanning cloud storage (S3, Dropbox, rclone), encryption (gcrypt), IPFS, VCS bridges (Mercurial, Bazaar, MediaWiki), P2P transports (BitTorrent, Nostr, SSB), SQLite, CouchDB, restic, and blockchain backends.
Table of contents
Built-in #Cloud and object storage #Encryption #Content-addressed storage #VCS bridges #P2P and decentralised #Transport wrappers #Blockchain #Other storage backends #Sort: