Maybe it’s time to really consider investing in IPFS. It was announced a while ago Obsidian Systems is excited to bring IPFS support to Nix - #47 by Ericson2314 but I assume it wasn’t important until now. There are probably quite a few people who wouldn’t mind hosting or spinning up an instance to host a part of the cache.
If it were as simple as something like the config below, I’d do it. I can easily set aside BTRFS volume of a few gigabyte to contribute to the cache.
nixpkgsCache = {
contribution = {
enable = true;
backend = "ipfs";
amount = lib.percentage "100";
location = "/mnt/nixpkgsDisk/";
}'
};
It could also be an option to have an option that allows sharing only the packages one has installed in order to save disk-space. I’d be up for that. It would also make it interesting to organizations that want to spin up a multiple instances of nixos machines in different datacenters.
I think it would also make it much easier for the community to contribute: “activate this flag and you contribute” vs “please donate money into this pot, it’s probably going where we say it is”.