Re: Lightning talk at IPFS camp

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

>>	 - A unified way to refer to stuff (I am thinking of IPLD here)
>>		 No more tarballs, git commits, etc. CIDs everywhere.
>
> Do you have a concrete use case?

I was thinking of the Guix package definitions. In the long run,
assuming IPFS turns out to be reliable enough, we could put all source
into IPFS with a CID reference, rather then today's many ways to
download source files.

>>	 - A unified storage scheme for all data, both "system" and "user".
>
> Can you elaborate?

Again in the long run, if we don't mind depending on IPFS, we don't need
the Guix store any more. Package installation would amount to local
pinning. Anyone could then build a package anywhere (home directory,
...) and just add it to IPFS. Since that also eliminates the technical
constraints of the store, the same mechanism could be used for any kind
of data processing, with the results stored in IPFS. Reproducibility of
any kind of computation via Guix, with building software just an
important special case.

> I'm not too sure about how human input would be logged, but at the very
> least the idea of distributing the store seems amazing.

For human input, Git would be OK, with repositories stored in IPFS
(there's already some support for that, see
https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipld-git). A more radical redesign is
Radicle (http://www.radicle.xyz/), which uses IPFS as a collaboration
platform (still at the git level). I guess Radicle could be used for
much more than that in Guix, but I haven't looked at that in detail.

Konrad.