Apparently IPFS is having a slow adoption problem – despite being an important solution to the enshitified gated centralised web.
Debian stands as the most popular among the well-supported distros. Debian has some degree of quality standards that (although not spectacular) relatively far surpass most distros. A package making it into the official Debian repos generally demonstrates that an app is up to scratch – ready for prime time.
If I have not overstated things, it must be at least somewhat embarrassing for both the IPFS project and Debian that IPFS has no client in the official Debian repos. IPFS should have targetting Debian as a goal to get respect and adoption… to get on the radar. It’s just a tarball now.
And from Debian’s standpoint, it’s not great that an important protocol to succeed HTTP is missing from official support.
If I have not overstated things
… feels like maybe you have just a bit but that’s just my own opinion :P
rant
I was actively tinkering with IPFS a few years back
on Windowsin a Ubuntu Linux VM running on Windows at the time . The IPFS software never felt stable and had some memory leak that would eventually lead to something crashing, it was kind of a PITA to lose all my pins and then have to reload them all the time. I’d pin content but it would take a while for other peers to find mine… IPFS content seemed to be easier to access once it’s been pinned and online for a while. The available search engines were pretty terrible too, the content I pinned to the network rarely ever showed up on any of them. To be fair people were still figuring out just how to actually crawl the IPFS network to index things into a search engine, maybe that’s all better nowadays.It also didn’t help that Protocol Labs seemed to lean into cryptocurrencies with Filecoin (a parallel network to IPFS), for a while it seemed like the only thing IPFS and Filecoin were used for was NFT junk.
A lot of people new to IPFS seem to think IPFS = free file storage but that storage has to come from somewhere. So either you’re self-hosting / pinning content to keep it online or relying on cloud storage services to host and pin the content into IPFS for you… and they usually want to be paid to host your data. In the end it felt like a much more complicated way to pay a file host to serve data for you.
I ended up losing interest in the whole thing but maybe it’s gotten better since then.
rant over
That aside, someone is/was attempting to package IPFS for the Debian unstable repos. It does sound like a bit of work since there are a ton of dependencies that also need to be packaged. If you’re interested in helping them out you could look into it, see
https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/being_packaged
also
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=wnpp%3Bdist%3Dunstable https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/being_packaged
EDIT: After commenting remembered my IPFS node was in a Ubuntu Linux VM… one of my experiments at the time was creating a bash script to generate IPFS and Bittorrent hashes to host online and test how uploading new content to both networks would pan out. It was a good learning experience for sure.
“Protocol to succeed HTTP” “Ben around for ten years”
Given I’ve never seen IPFS in the wild (I’ve used it in my own environment), those statements are rather contradictory.
I don’t see IPFS replacing HTTP, like ever.
Maybe that’s why Debian devs don’t care to push it.
I don’t consider successors to necessarily obsolete their predecessor. People still use and appreciate vinyl records despite having several successors (including magnetic tape which eventually lost ground to vinyl in the end, amid digital successors).