[Nix-dev] donating through hydra

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 02/28/2012 06:12 AM, Marc Weber wrote:
> And then? Do the same as current buildfarm does? Duplicate work by
> building subversion revisions?
>
> Or be a "slave" of the official buildfarm (in which case all users have
> to trust your server as well?)

Hi,
I have been thinking about a distributed solution to this. There are two 
things to be solved:
1) creating manifests (signed pairs of derivation and output hashes)
2) distributing the data (manifests simply, store paths differentially)

Note that 2) is easy as it needs almost none computational power, so we 
could use some well-known solution like bittorrent.

As you noticed, 1) has a problem with trust but this IMO also has 
distributed solutions like the web-of-trust stuff. You would always 
check if someone you trust have signed what you need (or at least k 
independent sources you trust). If not, you build it (there could also 
be some kind of locking not to duplicate work too much).

As always, I've got loads of ideas but no time to implement them...

By the way, I've also got some idle HW which could be used, If you find 
a suitable way.

Vlada