[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS is widely misunderstood

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

On 2011-01-31 15:20, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Kevin Reid <kpreid at switchb.org> writes:
>> On Jan 31, 2011, at 2:35, Zooko O'Whielacronx wrote:
>>
>>> 4. The misunderstanding that Tahoe-LAFS puts secrets into filenames
>>> which (if I understand correctly) James Donald was under when he
>>> posted http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-January/005966.html
>>
>> This reads to me as non-agreement about "what is a filename" not "what
>> does Tahoe-LAFS do with filenames-in-sense-a".
> 
> True, but tahoe breaks the dominant paradigm.  Since long ago,
> filesystems have had names, and inode numbers.  inode numbers have
> always been non-interesting; you know they are there and have to be kept
> track of, but many users are never aware of them, and even the
> uber-nerds look at them very rarely.  caps are partly like inodes, but
> due to the decentralized nature they are also used as mount points --
> which inodes basically never are.  I think it's this use of caps as
> mount points (or faux mount points, for WUI/CLI) that confuses people
> into thinking they are names.

Caps *are* names, in a more general sense of "name". I think that's the
sense James Donald was using.

However, the Tahoe CLI almost implements a petname system already, where
the aliases are petnames. It does not map the caps back into aliases when
printing them, as a full petname system would, but that doesn't matter
much because it very rarely prints them.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood  ⚥  http://davidsarah.livejournal.com

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