The wharf specification

Wharf is a protocol that enables incremental uploads and downloads tokeep software up-to-date. It includes:

• A diffing and patching algorithm, based on rsync
• An open file format specification for patches and signature files, based on protobuf
• Areference implementation in Go
• Acommand-line tool with several commands

Foreword

Good specifications are easy to read, practical guidelines that make it easierfor software to be interoperable. This book aims to be a good specification.

Its intended audience includes:

• People who want to understand the tenets ofitch.io's software delivery system,to judge its worth / audit it.
• People who want to write their own, spec-compatible implementation of the protocol
• People who want to use itch.io's implementation of wharf, but with their own backend.

No spec is perfect, but it is the author's hope that, together with the community,a solid spec can be achieved and yield numerous highly-compatible implementations.

Links

The latest version of this book is available at:

• https://docs.itch.ovh/wharf/master/index.html

Contributions can be made to it by submitting pull requests or issues on its GitHub repository:

• https://github.com/itchio/wharf-spec

Authors

Except when otherwise noted, this specification has been written byAmos Wenger