idea: pin through ipns names

[jbenet]

(old idea. document cause i cannot find it elsewhere) pins on ipns names would pin the name and it's target. So re-targetting the name would orphan the previous content, for gc to free.

eg:

ipfs pin add [-r] /ipns/$name
# at this point, $name is pinned recursively. but say it points to nothing. 

ipfs name publish /ipns/$name /ipfs/$content1
# /ipfs/$content1 is pinned indirectly

ipfs name publish /ipns/$name /ipfs/$content2
# /ipfs/$content2 is pinned indirectly
# /ipfs/$content1 is no longer pinned indirectly

ipfs repo gc
# /ipfs/$content1 is freed

[fazo96]

this is extremely important for use cases when an ipns name is updated very often.

[whyrusleeping]

@jbenet thoughts on having a 'link' type object in unixfs that would reference an ipns entry, but also cache the resolved value until an explicit 're-resolve' is called?

Or something along those lines

[whyrusleeping]

i realize without my thought process that might seem off topic. I'm thinking that we could link to ipns entries within a unixfs directory, and use that for pinning. You could then 'update' the pin explicitly, which would update the cached value, and change the dag

[jbenet]

yeah i imagine we will have to do ipns links within ipfs objects eventually. part of why i pushed for links to be proper full links (with the scheme).

and yes we likely can make ipns links be stored with a resolution at a given time. so a somewhat merkelized property still holds-- when the resolution changes, it still bubbles to the top changing the root.

[jbenet]

(it's storing "pointer" + "current value")