Re: Using a CDN or some other mirror?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <hartmut@goebel-consult.de> skribis:

> Am 03.12.2018 um 17:12 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
>> Thus, I’m thinking about using a similar setup, but hosting the mirror
>> on some Big Corp CDN or similar.
>
> Isn't this a contradiction: Building a free infrastructure relaying on
> servers from some Big Corporation? Let allow the privacy concerns
> raising when delivering data via some Big Corporation.
>
> If delivering "packages" works via static data without requiring any
> additional service, we could ask universities to host Guix, too. IMHO
> this is a much preferred solution since this is a decentralized publish
> infrastructure already in place for many GNU/Linux distributions.

As you know, berlin.guixsd.org is hosted at the Max Delbrück Center in
Berlin, a public research institute.  So in a way, we’re already doing
that.  We shouldn’t take it for granted that public institutes will
happily host our stuff and donate hardware: without Ricardo’s work and
the generosity of the MDC, we wouldn’t have anything there.

I understand the reluctance regarding “Big Corp” hosting, and I actually
share it to some extent.  However, having put much thought into it (and
also much sweat in build farm sysadmin…), I think the alternative is:
commercial hosting, or peer-to-peer.

Florian has been looking at the latter approach with IPFS, and perhaps
we’ll be able to put it in production in a few months and be happy with
it (I have good hopes given what Florian already demonstrated.)

In the meantime, we need redundant storage, high bandwidth, and high
availability.  If you know of non-profit organizations that can provide
such services, please let us know; if not, we’ll resort to a commercial
service.  The bottom line is: we cannot reasonably pretend to offer such
a service ourselves.

(Note that we’re just talking about substitute delivery—I wouldn’t want
to *build* packages on one of these commercial hosting services.)

I hope this clarifies my position.

Ludo’.