Re: Guix - GNUnet binary distribution roadmap

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi, Deepan,

Deepan Sekar <address@hidden> skribis:

> This is the implementation strategy(work that would be involved) I've come
> up with. If it is ok, then I'll proceed to develop the timeline for the
> work. I need your critics to improve it.

Thanks for your interest!

Note that another student, Pierre-Antoine Rault, is also interested in
this project for GSoC.  Please read the discussions we’ve had if you
haven’t already.

> 1. Users will search in the Guix store for the package. This will cause a
> Guix daemon to run which will return the installed version and the date of
> installation. This has to be worked upon.
>
> 2. Then, the user runs the command "guix get filename version_no." (new
> command which has to be implemented). This generates the hash with the
> filname and the version number as the values.

This is not the way things work in Guix.  Please read
<http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Introduction> and
Section 2 of <http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4584> for more info about the
hash that’s embedded in store file names.

> 3. This will in turn execute the "gnunet-dht-get" which will probe GNUnet
> DHT for the possible key/value tuples. The values will be the GNUnet peer
> which contains the file requested and the version available in the peer. A
> new implementation should be written which verifies if the version in the
> peer is greater than the existing version. This is all to be done by the
> same "gnunet-dht-get" command.
>
> 5. If so, then a MESH channel should be opened using the "gnu-mesh-connect
> gnunet_peer_id filename version". This does opening the connection,
> accessing the file and downloading the complete archive so that it
> simplifies the job for the user.
>
> 6. Once, the file has been downloaded, the implementation should verify the
> signature in the file, and call the existing guix commands to install the
> pacakage. All these features are already available. Hence, no work need to
> be done on this.

We have been refining this in the discussions with Pierre-Antoine.
Could you please start from where we left it?  I would like the proposal
to be closer to the implementation in order to avoid bad surprises
later.  In particular, see
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-03/msg00189.html>.

Thanks,
Ludo’.