Re: Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS) and Guile

[Christopher Lemmer Webber]

Congratulations pukkamustard, I really am excited by and respect the
work you're doing on this.  I think it's probably the proper replacement
slot for the storage work I'm doing in Spritely.

Once Spritely Goblins gets ported to Guile it'll be really fun to
combine these two things. :)

pukkamustard writes:

> Hello Guile Users,
>
> I'm happy to announce guile-eris 0.2.0. This is a Guile implementation
> of "Encoding for Robust Immutable Storage (ERIS)" [1].
>
> ERIS defines how an arbirtary sequence of bytes can be encoded into a
> set
> of uniformly sized blocks and an identifier (read capability). The
> blocks are encrypted such that the original content can only be
> decoded
> given the read capability. ERIS is a scheme for content-addressing in
> the sense that the read capability is deterministically computed from
> the content itself.
>
> This is done by splitting content into blocks, encrypting them and
> collecting references to blocks in a higher-level node (i.e. building
> a
> Merkle Tree). See the specification [1] for a detailed description of
> the encoding.
>
> Encodings like ERIS are common in protocols such as Bittorrent,
> GNUNet,
> IPFS, et. al. ERIS decouples the encoding from any particular protocol
> or application, allowing content to be referenced regardless of
> storage
> and transport layer. For example ERIS encoded content can be stored
> and
> transported over IPFS [2], but also over HTTP or via an USB stick.
>
> My interest in developing this has been for an ActivityPub-esque
> applications where content can be cached and replicated to make
> availability of content more robust. There seem to be many other
> applications, including Guix substitutes.
>
> ERIS is still "experimental". This release is intended to initiate
> discussion and collect feedback from a wider circle. In particular I'd
> be interested in your thoughts on applications and the Guile API.
>
> ERIS is very much related to Datashards [3] and is in progress of
> converging closer.
>
> I have submitted a patch to Guix. You should be able to start
> experimenting with ERIS with `guix environment --ad-hoc guile-eris
> guile` shortly.
>
> Thanks and happy hacking!
> -pukkamustard
>
> [1] http://purl.org/eris
> [2]
> https://gitlab.com/openengiadina/eris/-/blob/main/examples/ipfs.org
> [3] https://datashards.net/