Re: Using IPFS to host mirrors of source packages

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 08:38:32AM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> Ludovic Courtès transcribed 0.6K bytes:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:
> > 
> > > By hosting source packages on IPFS they become content addressable and
> > > should scale for downloads. It would also become a safe way of
> > > distributing data. 
> > >
> > > https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
> 
> I hope that you are aware that this isn't that safe.
> As an intermediate solution it is okay. It is similar to providing
> torrents. It works, but everyone wants the easy way, the
> easy solution which works $now.

What do you mean? Gnunet has a focus on privacy (at a cost of speed).
IPFS is not really meant to be private (though you can host a private
network). For public data it is safe. You have to trust the original
party that provides the file, but that is similar to what we are doing
today fetching data from github, ftp etc. (a Guix SHA check is good
enough).

Today I was bitten again by R/bioconductor removing source files. It
would make good sense to me to mirror those files on IPFS. I think
that is a long term solution.

Pj.