On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 09:33:25PM +0100, Rémi Birot-Delrue wrote:

GNUnet and IPFS seem to share some concepts (immutability, peer
identity/namespace) but IPFS is less mature: for instance, there’s a
priori no way to search a file. You might hit the same difficulties I’ve
encountred: unstable API, bugs, inaccurate or inexisting
documentation. Anyway, IPFS’s hyperlinked nature could be great to
handle multiple versions of a package.

Another issue with IPFS is that it's not anonymous. I've spent a few times
trying to get it to work with Tor but it absolutely hates proxies, and putting
strain on the Tor network like that is generally a bad idea.

I want to add IPFS as an option, not as the only way to download stuff. It might be better for privacy-conscious people to use http over Tor. 

With such a system
like this, people, organizations or companies using Guix could have their Guix
version (thus all of the packages, patches, etc) found by analyzing a few
substitutes being fetched over the network, much worse than traditional distros.

A company or any large install could run IPFS/Guix in a LAN, with a build server, which would bring *huge* performance gains while being private.