Subject: Re: [bug#44199] [PATCH 0/1] An origin method for GNUnet FS URI's

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 01:35:54 +0100

Hi Maxim,

Thanks for your detailed answer.

You might be interested by the coming oneline Guix Days conference on
Sun. 22nd 2020.  A session is specifically dedicated to a related topic:
How to distribute P2P?  Please browse this week the blog guix.gnu.org
for the details.

On Tue, 27 Oct 2020 at 19:50, Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Q: How does Guix figure out the GNUnet URI from the Guix (or nar, I
>    guess) hash?
> A: Not automatically.  The gnunet-fetch method as defined in this
>    patch needs to be passed the URI manually. However, an additional
>    service for GNUnet can be written that uses the DHT to map Guix
>    (or nar, or something else) hashes to corresponding GNUnet URI's.

From my understanding, this is a show stopper.  It has to be solved
first going further, IMHO.  It is not possible to write manually the URI
for all the packages.  And as perhaps you read with the project
’disassemble’, it is not straightforward.

> Q: What about automatically generated tarballs (e.g. from git
>    repositories)?
> A: Not addressed by this patch. The intention is to be able to replace
>    a http://*/*.tar.gz URL with a gnunet://fs/chk URI in package
>    definitions; source code repositories aren't supported by this
>    patch. (But perhaps a future patch could support this!)

I think this is the main issue: it is not affordable to replace for some
packages the current http:// by gnunet://.  Especially when GNUnet is
not “stable“.

> * Is package *source code* only available, on *GNUnet*?
>
>   If someone published the source code (e.g. as a tarball) on GNUnet
>   with `gnunet-publish hello-2.10.tar.gz`, it is only published(*) on
>   GNUnet, and not somewhere else as well.
>
>   (*) I don't know exactly when one can be reasonably sure the file
>   will *remain* available for some time when published, except for
>   keeping the GNUnet daemon running continuously.
>
>   However, in practice, $MAINTAINER will publish the source code
>   somewhere else as well (e.g. <https://ftp.gnu.org> or perhaps ipfs).
>   This patch doesn't automatically publish source code of built or
>   downloaded packages on GNUnet, although that seems a useful service 
>   to run as a daemon.

Therefore the corollary question is: how many tarballs currently used as
source by Guix are also available on GNUnet?

Thank you for your interest.  And again I invite you to join the
discussion about P2P and Guix this Sunday 22nd.  Read on the Guix
blog. :-)

All the best,
simon