"gx is a packaging tool built around the distributed, content addressed filesystem IPFS. It aims to be flexible, powerful and simple."

i love the idea of gx. i want to set up a server for rehosting curated subsets of npm and pypi packages to work with gx.

https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx

gx is alpha as heck but the approach makes worlds of sense to me. the npm folks work hard to maintain infrastructure that can support the node/js ecosystem, but they're still a single point of failure and we pay for it all the time. moving package distribution to p2p infrastructure cuts that out, though it introduces namespace problems as we lose naming authorities. even so, what, are we really gonna pretend izs can guarantee infinite nines?

we've seen with the fediverse what a difference community moderation can make. with a system like ipfs where files and folders are broken into unique blocks for distribution, decentralized naming authorities can peer the blocks of a package even if the name they assign to it conflicts with other authorities. this permits package curation on a per-authority basis while devolving distribution and storage to p2p infrastructure.

@garbados Personally, I see it as the next logical iteration over the concept of 'distro'.
Debian or Fedora are examples of authorities we give our trust to run stuff on our computers.

Mix-and-match distros happening in parallel by anyone leads to a massive increase of the rate of experiments, cross-pollination, and parallelisation in development being tried out, and a massive speed up in the evolution of the systems we use.

What's not to like? 😃

@h @garbados p2p OS is still a few years off. Literally every non-me linux user I interacted with hates the idea.

@SoniEx2 @h a p2p OS? i'm not sure i know what that means, or even what it might be like.

@garbados @SoniEx2 @h presumably they mean an OS where all software (and content if you're extreme) is published and accessed entirely via p2p networks.

@samis @garbados @h the OS's package manager (like apt or pacman) would be fully p2p. It wouldn't even talk to a central server to get the package list - rather, you'd have a list of maintainers (they put packages in an append-only stream), some packagers the maintainers grab packages from, and another stream for metadata, basically saying "these are the packages and versions I can currently recommend installing" (the "package db" as some distros call it).