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

From: zimoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:39:54 +0100

Dear,

Thank you for the patch.  My questions are totally naive since I do not
know much about GNUnet.

On Sat, 24 Oct 2020 at 21:47, Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> wrote:
> This patch defines a `gnunet-fetch' method, allowing for downloading
> files from GNUnet by their GNUnet chk-URI.
>
> This patch does not provide:
> - a service configuration
> - downloading substitutes from GNUnet
> - fall-back to non-P2P (e.g. http://) or other P2P (e.g. ipfs://)
>   systems
> - downloading directories over GNUnet

This means it only works for archives as tarball, right?

> - actual packages definitions using this method
>
> Some issues and questions:

[...]

> - Would it be possible somehow for url-fetch to support gnunet://fs/chk
>   URIs? That way we could fall-back unto non-P2P URLs, which would be
>   useful to bootstrap a P2P distribution from a non-P2P system.

Who is the “we”?  What do you mean by “url-fetch supports gnunet:// and
fall-back unto non-P2P”?

Some recent discussions are about content-address and fallback.  For
example, roughly speaking ’git-fetch’ tries upstream, then the Guix
build farms, then Software Heritage (swh).  For Git repo, it works
because the address from Guix side to SWH is straightforward.  The 2
other VCS –hg and svn– supported by SWH should be implemented soon… who
knows! ;-)

The story about archives as tarball is a bit more complicated.  The main
issue –as I understand it– can be summarized as: Guix knows the URL, the
integrity checksum and only at package time the content of the tarball.
Later in time, it is difficult to lookup because of this very address;
and some are around: nar, swh-id, ipfs, gnunet, etc.

Bridges to reassemble the content are currently discussed, e.g.,

   <https://git.ngyro.com/disarchive-db/>
   <https://git.ngyro.com/disarchive>

Well, today the fallback of tarball archive to SWH is not reliable.

What is your question? ;-)

> Then publish the source tarball of the package to the GNUnet FS system:
> $ guix environment --ad-hoc wget -- wget 
> https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz
> $ gnunet-publish hello-2.10.tar.gz

Naive question:  are packages only available on GNUnet?

All the best,
simon