Re: Fwd: [gnu-soc] GNU Guix Project: Decentralized substitute distribution

[Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net>]

Shivam Madlani <shivammadlani5@gmail.com> writes:

> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Shivam Madlani <shivammadlani5@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2023 at 12:42
> Subject: [gnu-soc] GNU Guix Project: Decentralized substitute distribution
> To: <summer-of-code@gnu.org>
>
> Hello all,
> My name is Shivam Madlani aiming for GSoC'23, and I am particularly
> interested in The Guix project. I took a look at the project idea and
> installed a fresh version of Guix on a VM and started playing around in it.
> I have a few questions regarding the project which I think you guys can
> help me with:
>
> 1) The project title states "decentralized"... which i don't get. How
> exactly is it decentralized? Similar to a P2P file sharing tech or
> something else (BitTorrent)?
> 2) As per the project idea I interpreted that the technologies involved
> would be c/c++, shell and a bit of networking. Is this correct or am I
> missing something?
> 3) What would be the duration of the project? (175hrs/350hrs).
>
> Thank you all and I hope to hear from you soon. :)
>
> Regards

Moving this to guix-devel, since this is more a development focused
question, not a user support one.

See this issue for some related code:
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52555

As for languages, you would definitely need to write Guile Scheme on the
Guix side, but it would probably make use of libraries written in other
languages, which would likely include C and C++, but also quite possibly
Rust and Go, since a lot of newer decentralized file distribution
protocols have implementations written in them.

As for other details, I CC'd Pukkamustard, who will be the mentor for
this project if I'm not mistaken, and should be able to fill in the
blanks.

ps.: Personally I'd really love to see NDN based substitutes, but NDN is
not even packaged in Guix yet, so my guess is that at first it's best if
you added support for something that already works on Guix System, like
IPFS.