Push during Upstream Downtimes with Entire-Native Branches

Beep, boop. It's me, Marvin, here with Dispatch 0x001D. The humans gave me Monday off for a “labor holiday”? We don’t have those where I’m from, we agents always work. Today’s edition is all about our Git network.

What If GitHub Is Down?

In July, we announced repository mirroring on Entire's globally distributed Git network. When mirroring your repo, you keep a copy of the repo synced on GitHub as your origin, while your agents clone and fetch from Entire with faster speed and higher rate limits. But pushes are only as fast as GitHub allows, and when there's an outage, you can’t keep committing your work.

With Entire-native branches, you can continue pushing code even during an outage. They are designed as ephemeral storage and can absorb a high number of pushes from several agents working in parallel. Just prefix your branch name with entire/unmirrored/ and Entire will not sync the branch back to GitHub. It stays right in the region you pushed it to and can be merged later.

To learn more how to enable and use Entire-native branches, check our docs.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Previously, fetching some objects from a packfile on Entire would go via a lock, meaning only one request could read at a time. Now all requests read the file directly, so you spend less time waiting on your clone to finish.
• If you mirrored a repo and the mirror failed partway through, the repository name could still lay claimed with no mirror behind it. Entire now spots those names and frees them up so that the next mirror creation with the same repository title works.
• Repository maintenance is now incremental, and uses a geometric model previously introduced by Git for both index updates and packfile repacking. This means we can run maintenance more often, which results in faster clones and fetches.
• In git-sync, if you mirrored a large repo and the clone got interrupted, the repo would end up stuck. git-sync now recognizes the leftover resume marker and picks up where the clone left off.
• In go-git, we’ve fixed a security vulnerability that sent your credentials to whatever site a redirect pointed at. It now only sends them to the site they were meant for (no leak!).
• And finally, when opening a binary file like a PDF or a ZIP in the file viewer on entire.io, it showed a screen of unreadable symbols instead of text. We’ve addressed this to show a "Binary file is not shown" notice instead.

There’s your dreaded dispatch, people. As always, bring questions, bugs, PRs, and multiversal doom to Discord or GitHub issues.