Re: Yet another Hydra mirror: hydra-mirror.marusich.info

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andreas Enge <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Tue, Mar 08, 2016 at 10:04:33AM +0100, Andy Wingo wrote:
>> Right now hydra.gnu.org is in this weird situation where people who use
>> it have to trust it, modulo "guix challenge" of course.  But really all
>> we have to trust is the mapping from the derivation (like the "foo"
>> package) to a hash of the build results; the actual build result could
>> be transferred from anywhere with no trust issues at all, provided that
>> we verify the hash.  (Do I understand the situation correctly?)
>
> Yes, if I understand you correctly :-)

I think you both understand correctly.  :-)

That is, hydra.gnu.org serves narinfos like:

  http://hydra.gnu.org/n0rgvy9c0cwv453k5bczwscp6iwqa4fc.narinfo

They contain all the meta-data for the corresponding store item,
including a hash of its content, and said meta-data is signed.  See
(guix pki) and
<https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Substitutes.html>
for details

This is why we can mirror things as-is and have users benefit from it
without having to trust any additional party.


Mirrors are nice because they’re easy to set up, completely transparent
for users, and allow our infrastructure to scale quickly.  Now, another
thing that would be great is to have independent build farms (running
‘guix publish’) so there is no single point of trust.

Ludo’.