groundstation is a database, and framework for operating with the database, intended to build distributed knowledge graphs, and then sync them up in hostile network settings.
The core of its implementation is an object store of linked immutable objects that are synced via a gossip protocol.
The current version uses libgit2 as a storage backend, but doesn't use many git primitives, beyond git's objects as a storage medium. Git is deliberately pulled out into a storage driver, however while groundstation doesn't assume that you're using git it does assume you're using something that looks a lot like git.
groundstation hinges on the notion of protocols internally – groundstation core provides you with content addressable storage, but it's up to you to work out what to actually do with that data.
That said, groundstation does ship with some protocol adaptors. Adaptors take
the form name@domain:adaptor-version, and until such time as a release is
already, everything that ships with groundstation will be released with
richo@psych0tik.net as the email, ie richo@psych0tik.net:github-0.0.0.
groundstation is mostly self contained, and hasn't relied on unreleased features in libgit2 or pygit2 for some time now. Assuming that you have a working and recent libgit2 you should be able to run the test suite by running:
Groundstation should work with the latest stable version of pygit2, which unfortunately still depends on an unreleased version of libgit2. It has been a while since I used new features in pygit2 though, so older versions should work fine as far back as 0.18.
- install libgit2 from the
developmentbranch. pip install -r requirements.txt(On OSX you'll need toexport CC=clangfor pycrypto)make groundstation_dev
You probably want to install those requirements in a virtualenv.
There is also a tiny unittest suite for some of the javascript in Airship, you can run them by running:
npm installmake airship_test
You'll almost certainly want to have a read of the hacking document, and check out the other misc hacking docs.