Re: plz is there a roadmap for a more resilient substitutes infrastructure?

[Pjotr Prins]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 11:51:20PM +0100, Julien Lepiller wrote:
> We could easily distribute nar files over distributed networks (IPFS, 
> bittorrent, …) but we still need a "canonical source" that builds these 
> packages, otherwise how do you know what you are looking for? Don't we always 
> need some sort of central authority?

Yes. A name service which is fed from accredited build servers. 

It is not hard to keep a few build servers in the 'air' which can be
replaced on demand - even run in the cloud or in VMs. What is hard it
to create a 100% uptime service that serves many generations of nars.
Lot of data, and the data load can be high. This is what we ought to
consider fanning out.

Guix can support both systems, existing and new. Just add a
substitute-url which resolves to an IPFS based naming scheme. Could
even be integrated with guix-publish. Anyone who would run a
guix-publish server could choose to expose an IPFS node for sharing.

But I think it can be lighter weight. If we have a name service we
could indeed just make use of any protocol that serves files. As long
as the download hash is known. So, guix-named provides pointers to nar
entities with their download hash and guix-download is capable of
querying guix-named and provides more protocols. IPFS protocol is well
defined and there exist implementations in multiple languages. 

Anyway, this all requires more thought and a proof-of-concept. The
point really is to design a distributed system based on existing
components.

Pj.