Re: [GSoC] GNUnet binary distribution system

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Thanks for your proposal!

Pierre-Antoine Rault <address@hidden> skribis:

> Having worked with libtorrent and kademila, i am quite familiar with dht
> and P2P, and I think GNUnet shouldn't be much difficult to adapt to. I
> am thus reading info about GNUnet, but I already have some features in
> mind (not sure if redondant with other messages posted before):

Please do get in touch with the GNUnet folks as well.  I’ve Cc’d them so
you can say hi.  ;-)

> * As said by Andreas Enge, users should all be able to share packages
> themselves, provided they can cryptographically sign their binaries.
> They would deploy a node (a personnal node) using a local deamon (could
> be by passing a command to guix-daemon which would handle the task). The
> local daemon would contact a list of known nodes (contained in a
> mirrorlist) and send them hashes with their corresponding signature.

What exactly do is meant by “node” and “mirrorlist” here?

The initial discussion [0] left open the question of where binaries
themselves should be stored.  A possibility would be to use GNUnet’s DHT
simply as a discovery mechanism, and then to establish a connection
directly to the user’s machine, which would run, say, and HTTP server.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2013-03/msg00085.html

> * Users should be able to trust a node. That would not mean trusting all
> providers for all hashes recursively, but rather trust those trusted by
> the node in cascade. Thus a distinction beetween trusted pairs and
> trusted node pairs should be done.

Please read the “Invoking guix archive” section of the manual (from
Git), to get a feel of the current approach.  See also Mark’s message at
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-02/msg00297.html>
for ideas of what we’d like.

> * I think we should focus on ease of use, since it could become a good
> alternative to setting up a full fledged server to share officially
> supported packages and unofficial ones (like the AUR for Archlinux).

That’s been discussed before (see
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2013-08/msg00127.html>),
but it’s orthogonal.

> My Scheme level isn't high, but I'm learning Geiser/Paredit at the
> moment and reading the docs thoroughly.

Depending on the approach taken, it could be an issue if you have little
experience with Scheme.

This proposal needs discussion with both Guix and GNUnet people (and
notably Sree Harsha, who is at the intersection of both projects :-)),
to work towards a concrete road map of things to hack on.

Thanks,
Ludo’.