Gentoo on ZeroNet and IPFS

[Gatak]

I think that Gentoo should have its websites available on ZeroNet and use IPFS for distribution as addition to the normal mirrors .

[Ant P.]

Well volunteered, looking forward to seeing your patches in portage.

[Gatak]

[Naib]

[Gatak]

Well how would patches in portage help ? Clearly that's beside the point.

As for hosting a mirror on ZeroNet. Sure I can do but I do not have the resources to make the site itself.

Since Gentoo is about choices, expanding to be available on ZeroNet would be great. It's also helping promote decentralization in general.

IPFS could reduce bandwidth requirements for Gentoo mirrors. Cloudflare among others already do support it.

I think statements like Ant.P wrote are just arrogant and off putting. There are lots of people with good ideas and wishes without the skills to write patches or code in general. Are they not welcome here?

[Naib]

[Hu]

There are also lots of people with bad ideas, whose inexperience with implementing the idea lets them mistake it for a good idea that is easy to implement. Absent evidence to the contrary, short-form suggestions like the one you made are assumed not to have been prototyped or otherwise evaluated for viability. If the idea is not viable, then it doesn't matter how useful it would be if someone did it anyway.

For example, it'd be great if the Gentoo project offered free 24/7 on-call support for when I don't like how a package behaves and it needs to be patched to do what I want (even when my use case is so niche that no one else will ever want the change). That would be hugely expensive to do at scale, and no one would volunteer to do it, so I don't expect it would ever happen. However, it would be very convenient for me. Should I make a post suggesting that the project do this?

As regards your suggestions:

• If you are not volunteering the resources to do this work, then who would be responsible for creating and maintaining the site? How much additional burden would this cause, beyond the burden of running the project today?
• Where can an interested administrator find authoritative guidance on how to do this? I hadn't even heard of ZeroNet prior to your post. I was vaguely aware of IPFS from someone else talking about it a while back.
• What, if any, additional liabilities (legal, financial) would the project face for doing this? Have you investigated that? What did you find?
• How much complexity does this add to the daily workflow of Gentoo developers? Their work causes changes on the mirrors, in a way that is currently relatively well understood, as regards availability and timing delays. Would these IPFS mirrors be as current and accurate as the existing project mirrors?
• What changes would be required to Portage to enable it to benefit from storing the mirrored files on IPFS? Would these also require changes to individual ebuilds or would it be sufficient to patch the package manager?

Other questions might arise. This is just what I can envision quickly. If you aren't volunteering to do the work, and can't address these questions, why should someone else volunteer their time to research the viability of your idea?

[Gatak]

Alright. I was a little niggly before. My apologies.

NeroNet is basically a free open internet that is decentralized and hosted by all its peers. It's not exactly a new idea but this implementation seems perhaps a bit more promising. Ill look into more details on how to manage a site/store on there. I actually thought that at first simply have a small homepage with general info and links back to Gentoo.org.

For IPFS you can read a little on https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/amp/ and https://www.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

I suppose regarding portage that some patches would be needed to support IPFS. There are some public IPFS gateways which might be an alternative to use. The difficult bit is the mapping of file names to hashes so wget/curl would know what to get. I'm definitely willing to host a mirror like this, but I will need help with some coding.

[NeddySeagoon]

Gatak,

Is IPFS another freenet?
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Gatak]

No. IPFS is not anonymising. Freenet is more a web platform. IPFS is a global distributed filesystem where each file and folder has an identity based on a crypto hash rather than just a file name. This makes it very resiliant to counter fait contents. The peers that browse IPFS also cache some of the data and re-shares it. Kind of like torrents do. This is what makes it very resiliant to outages and saves bandwidth from the original mirror.

If one want to be anonymous then Tor and the like is needed and out of this scope.

[Ant P.]

[Gatak]

[Muso]

[Maitreya]

although having Gentoo resources like websites and manuals online does seem like a good idea.
I would advice against portage or binhost in there.
I've tried it and it is horribly slow. And I don't mean the transfer speed itself. I'm talking about the _update_ speed.
Sure, first upload goes quick enough, but once you update a file in that set it needs to recompute the entire tree.

[Naib]

I'm going to put my systems engineer hat on for this...
1) does it equal the present use cases
2) does it embody functionality that is broken in the present method (which presebtly needs to be resolve externally (frigged) )
3) does it extend present use cases.

Unless all three a met then whatever is being advocated cannot usurp the incumbent. If it solves 2 and 3 it could exist as a parallel service BUT then there is the infra overhead to consider
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