Re: [GSoC] Guix + GNUnet: what’s next

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Rémi,

Thanks for the update!

So I can see two milestones now, as we discussed before:

  1. Create a variant of ‘guix publish’ that publishes over GNUnet’s
     file sharing (FS) service, using the neat bindings that you wrote.

     For that you can literally copy guix/scripts/publish.scm as a
     starting point, and simply remove the HTTP-related code (which is a
     small fraction.)  The rest will be mostly identical: narinfo
     meta-data generation, signing.  I guess it will be easy to test it
     using gnunet-search and similar tools.

     As a 2nd step, we’ll see how we can refactor things to allow code
     sharing between the existing ‘guix publish’ and its GNUnet variant.

  2. Create a variant of ‘guix substitute’ for searches through GNUnet.
     Again, a large part of the code is about narinfo and signature
     checking, and it can be reused.

I’m not completely clear on how search for substitutes will work,
though.  Currently, when the user wants to build /gnu/store/xyz, ‘guix
substitute’ simply fetches http://hydra.gnu.org/xyz.narinfo.  How will
that work with GNUnet?  Are we going to look up their /gnu/store file
name?

Thanks,
Ludo’.