4.9 Packet I/O

Monotone can produce and consume data in a convenient, portable form called packets. A packet is a sequence of ASCII text, wrapped at 70-columns and easily sent through email or other transports. If you wish to manually transmit a piece of information – for example a public key – from one monotone database to another, it is often convenient to read and write packets.

Note: earlier versions of monotone queued and replayed packet streams for their networking system. This older networking system has been removed, as the netsync protocol has several properties which make it a superior communication system. However, the packet I/O facility will remain in monotone as a utility for moving individual data items around manually.

mtn privkey keyid

mtn pubkey keyid

These commands print out an keypair or pubkey packet for the RSA key keyid. These can be used to transport public or private keys safely between monotone databases.

mtn read [file...]

This command reads packets from files or stdin and stores them in your database.