The nix store seems on the face of it like a perfect use case for something like IPFS
There are efforts underway to make things content addressed. This doesn't solve the trust problem -- you still have to trust someone to tell you which inputs map to which content address -- but it does help with the distribution problem. Mirrors no longer have to be trusted. Trust and distribution become decoupled.
Views of purely functional data transformations of f_tran(n)(addr_start:addr_end), but if you symbolize it you, you make it generic. The problem is that Nix isn't Haskell enough.
It also sounds like if they stored the cache on a deduping file system that their storage costs would plummet.
How do you build with an arbitrary build tool then? You have to call out to gcc/any other compiler in the process.
you still need either pay someone to “pin it”, which is more expensive than dumping it on s3. Pinning services (that’s a thing) are all sketchy (as the big ones are all somehow connected to NFTs) and if you do it yourself it’s actually harder than just storing it
The point of IPFS is to decouple the names of resources from what's serving them. It's exactly what is needed for distributed libre software projects where many are willing to donate some resources, but few are able to donate all the resources.
I still don't know if Tahoe is appropriate though. It's been a while since I looked at it, but doesn't it work with a fixed set of storage nodes? That wouldn't work for nodes coming/going where people can join organically.