[mnet-devel] Ickle me, pickle me, tickle me too...

[Zooko]

> Doesn't this require the blockstore knowing all of the possible 
> "locations"?
...
> to require the sort of knowledge about what is happening inside the 
> black box on the part of the localblockstore that makes the hair on the 
> back of my neck stand up...

Yeah, that's pretty creepy all right!

So, this may be a dumb question, but what's wrong with just storing the block 
in a file named by the mojosixbit-encoding of the blockId, in a three-level 
deep directory tree of the leading characters of the mojosixbit-encoded id?

For extra metadata like "number of times this block was requested" or "Mojos 
earned by selling this block", we can have another file named 
<blockId>.metadata.  (Note that we don't have to require consistency of such 
extra metadata, which is why it doesn't introduce any problem to keep it in a 
separate file.)

Now all issues of consistency between the index (the directory and file 
structure) and the contents (the contents of the files) are the problem of the 
file system.

For efficiency, we can always cache whatever we want in transient RAM, thus 
not having to worry about consistency between the localblockstore and the 
cache (which disappears on system crash).

Now I know that this is much like what Mnet v0.6 currently does, except that 
it *also* has an index, which seems to offer the worst of both worlds, and 
that index is *also* built on bsddb which seems to offer the worst of three 
worlds.

Okay, so I know that some people don't like having all these files in their 
filesystems.  It slows down their "find . -name pr0n" or their "Scientology 
Inc. defragment utility", or something.  But it *does* solve all of the 
problems of managing an index by the simple expedient of using the operating 
system's built-in file-indexing feature, right?

--Z



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