IPNS helper

[magik6k]

See #3 (comment)

[dirkmc]

@magik6k what else needs to be done to get the IPNS helper working?

[magik6k]

2 most significant things:

• Publish to IPNS, integrate with keystore nicely (ipns helper currently returns unixfs tree the ipns record should point at)
• Implement some mechanism to map large git objects (> 1mb) to ipfs files (see Handle blob objects larger than MessageSizeMax ipfs/go-ipld-git#18 (4.)).

[dirkmc]

When you say "integrate with keystore nicely" do you mean that when pushing the first time, the IPNS git helper should create a new key in the key store, and associate the unixfs tree with that key in IPNS?

[magik6k]

maybe not 'associate the unixfs tree', but something like:

git [push/pull] ipns::keystoreKeyName should work. Integrating with dnslinks would be a nice feature too (we'd need to resolve first to see if the dnslink resolves to /ipns name and then see if we have a key for that name in the keystore)

[magik6k]

push should also print ipns::QmKey like it currently does with the ipld helper

[dirkmc]

Currently it prints the IPFS hash of the patched object with an ipns:: prefix, eg
Pushed to IPFS as ipns::Qmeue...
Do you think it would make sense to instead update the IPNS key to point to this IPFS key and print
Pushed to IPFS as /ipfs/Qmeue...
Updated IPNS key /ipns/QmIPNSKey to point to /ipfs/Qmeue...

[magik6k]

We could print both, but it might be confusing for some users. I'd keep the ipns:: prefix as it allows for easier copy-paste, and only print ipns key to not confuse users unfamiliar with ipfs.

[dirkmc]

Ok so I'm imagining that the user would do one of the following:

• git push --set-upstream ipns::/ipns/QmIPNSkey branchname
• git push --set-upstream ipns:: branchname
  In the second case the ipns helper would mint an ipns key for the user

At the end it would print
Pushed to IPFS as ipns::/ipns/QmIPNSkey...

Does that sound right?

[magik6k]

Yep, that's about right. We might also want to store mapping between branches and keys in the tracker

[dirkmc]

It seems like there is a bug in go-ipfs-api ipns name publish so I will wait till you have completed the work on core API

[Arlodotexe]

Think we can move forward on this now?

[mainiak]

I thought this doesn't really work?

Unless I did something wrong when I was trying to use it - https://gist.github.com/mainiak/03f202480405affca3fd80dd8f6a7008