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

[Pjotr Prins]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2018 at 01:16:03PM +0100, Giovanni Biscuolo wrote:
> please is there a roadmap in GNU and/or Guix devel team to address this
> problems?

I think it would be a good idea to create a more distributed approach
for creating and finding substitutes. A simple name service would
help. We could even use IPFS or something to fetch nar files - IPFS
comes with a name service. That way anyone building a substitute could
push it to IPFS and expose it to the rest of the world. Since IPFS is
content-addressable we can prevent injections. Any change to the file
would change its location. So the address + NAR hash is safe. And no
key setting required.

Does away with the dependency on just a few machines. Maintaining
machines is a pain. Why not distribute the effort? I am happy to build
some stuff and put it out there - in fact I already run my own
substitute server, but it has only the substitutes I need. If we all
do that we can bundle resources together. Guix can easily support
that.

If someone wants to think this through and can write a prototype it
would make a great talk at FOSDEM. We can also discuss it at Guix
days.

Pj.