brendoncarroll
Joined 6 years ago
Karma
195
Submissions
71
Member since
Jan 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 months ago
No Nonsense Containers: a simple Linux containerization tool, secure by default, with support for presets.
https://github.com/brendoncarroll/nnc
I use it for running agents locally.
nnc run /usr/bin/opencode --preset agent
https://github.com/brendoncarroll/nnc/tree/master/presets
Presets are written in Jsonnet, and resolve to a list of things to pass through from the parent process into the container. Presets can reference other presets, so you can build up arbitrary rules for passing files and devices into containers, give those rules a name, and reference them later.
Comment · 6 months ago
Thanks for the link.
It looks like this treats files as blobs just like Git, and trees as single objects which fit in memory. Assuming that is a correct understanding, this core abstraction would need to change to handle large files and directories well.
All the well known version control systems do this though, and it simplifies the system significantly. It's the right model for source code, but it doesn't translate well to arbitrary data.
Comment · 6 months ago
I've heard that jj has support for non-git backends?
Can anyone comment on how difficult it would be to add support for another backend, any docs or examples?
I have a project[0] that does the large file thing well, but is missing most of the version control porcelain. I've been looking for the path of least resistance to integrate it into something with a larger user base.
Comment · 8 months ago
I'm working on Got, version control like Git, but for files and directories of any size and E2E encrypted.
Got is built on Blobcache, which is a general-purpose transactional storage layer and E2E encrypted backend.
Comment · 9 months ago
Yes the author reached out. There has not yet been a confusion among real users that I am aware of.
Comment · 9 months ago
> The problem is when you move beyond text files it gets hard to tell what changes between two versions without opening both versions in whatever program they come from and comparing.
Yeah, totally agree. Got has not solved conflict resolution for arbitrary files. However, we can tell the user where the files differ, and that the file has changed.
There is still value in being able to import files and directories of arbitrary sizes, and having the data encrypted. This is the necessary infrastructure to be able to do distributed version control on large amounts of private data. You can't do that easily with Git. It's very clunky even with remote helpers and LFS.
I talk about that in the Why Got? section of the docs.
Comment · 9 months ago
Me too. Version control is great, it should get more use outside of software.
Notable differences: E2E encryption, parallel imports (Got will light up all your cores), and a data structure that supports large files and directories.
Comment · 9 months ago
I also wrote a tool for doing this[0], after one of these agents edited a config file outside of the repo it was supposed to work within.
I only realized the edit because I have my dotfiles symlinked to a git repository, and git status showed it when I was committing another change.
It's likely that the agents are making changes that I (and others) are not aware of because there is no easy way to detect them.
The approach I started taking is mounting the directory, that I want the agent to work on, into a container. I use `/_` as the working directory, and have built up some practices around that convention; that's the only directory that I want it to make changes to. I also mount any config it might need as read-only.
The standard tools like claude code, goose, charm, whatever else, should really spawn the agent (or MCP server?) in another process in a container, and pipe context in and out over stdin/stdout. I want a tool for managing agents, and I want each agent to be its own process, in its own container. But just locking up the whole mess seems to work for now.
I see some people in the other comments iterating on what the precise arguments to bubblewrap should be. nnc lets you write presets in Jsonnet, and then refer them by name on the command line, so you can version and share the set of resources that you give to an agent or subprocess.
Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
I personally think that this is the future, especially since such an architecture allows for E2E encryption of the entire database.
The protocol should just be a transaction layer for coordinating changes of opaque blobs.
All of the complexity lives on the client. That makes a lot of sense for a package manager because it's something lots of people want to run, but no one really wants to host.
My email is on my website.
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/brendoncarroll; my proof: https://keybase.io/brendoncarroll/sigs/fYaonvrG14Nua37nuEegQ1J9jl0b0RYIc3PyBRtwbjE ]