Subject: Re: CDN performance

From: Giovanni Biscuolo <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2018 13:40:19 +0100

Hi Mark,

sorry for the late reply

Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> writes:

> Giovanni Biscuolo <[email-masked]> writes:
>> with a solid infrastructure of "scientifically" trustable build farms,
>> there are no reasons not to trust substitutes servers (this implies
>> working towards 100% reproducibility of GuixSD)
>
> What does "scientifically trustable" mean?

I'm still not able to elaborate on that (working on it, a sort of
self-research-hack project) but I'm referencing to this message related
to reduced bootstrap tarballs:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-11/msg00347.html

and the related reply by Jeremiah (unfortunately cannot find it in
archives, Message-ID: <[email-masked]>)

in particular Jeremiah replied this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> so, if I don't get it wrong, every skilled engineer will be able to
> build an "almost analogic" (zero bit of software preloaded) computing
> machine ad use stage0/mes [1] as the "metre" [2] to calibrate all other
> computing machines (thanks to reproducible builds)?

well, I haven't thought of it in those terms but yes I guess that is one
of the properties of the plan.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

and

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> so, having the scientific proof that binary conforms to source, there
> will be noo need to trust (the untrastable)

Well, that is what someone else could do with it but not a direct goal
of the work.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

maybe a more correct definition of the above "scientific proof" should be
"mathematical proof"

I lack the theoretical basis to be more precise now, sorry :-S

a marketing-like campaign sould be "no more trusting trust"

best regards
Giovanni

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures