IPFS ❤ Python Wheels: Efficient, Secure and Reproducible Repository
Python wheel is a beautifully simple format for cross-platform binary distribution. Combining it with the simple repository API, we have the Python Package Index (PyPI) tirelessly serving Pythonistas. PyPI is great as a package index, but in certain ways it is unsuitable for end-user usages: it is subject to multiple supply chain attacks, its centralised nature leads to difficult mirroring while being a single point
of failure, and expensive dependency resolution is left for client-side.
The interplanetary wheels (IPWHL) are platform-unique, singly-versioned Python binary distributions backed by IPFS. It does not try to replace PyPI but aims to be a downstream wheel supplier in a fashion similar to GNU/Linux distributions, whilst take advantage of a content-addressing peer-to-peer network to provide a reproducible, easy-to-mirror source of packages.