Explain how versioning can work in IPFS.

[Mr0grog]

There’s a fair amount of confusion about whether and how IPFS tracks version histories for your files, partially spurred by some confusing language at https://ipfs.io (there will be another issue for fixing that) — while IPFS can store every version of a file (because they’ll have different CIDs) and conceptualize files as versions of each other by virtue of sharing blocks, it doesn’t have any native system for describing the version history of a file by linking together a sequence of CIDs that have represented the file over time.

We need a guide that clearly explains the above, then discusses approaches to creating and storing version histories on IPFS:

• Keeping a simple list of CIDs + a current CID, like the IPFS website repo does (see version listing here and update code here)
• Custom IPLD formats
• Using sequence numbers or hash links in custom IPRS records
• Combinations of the above
• etc.

[meiqimichelle]

cc @flyingzumwalt

[BlocksOnAChain]

this should be revisited if IPFS collections happen - @lidel

[TheDiscordian]

As the language on the website was updated, is this still an issue? We now have https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/, which should spark some imagination for how one could handle a history. Though I'm unsure what IPFS collections are, so I suppose it could pop back into relevance.

[johnnymatthews]

Yeah, this issue is pretty dated, and is obviously quite stale. I'm gonna close it for now.