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Propose more explicit expectations of serialization of UnixFS data #271
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"serialized data from other codecs" is too broad...
An implicit constraint of the merkledag protobuf encoding is that
Links
is a single-level list of structs with a well defined single pointer in each.By saying "you can replace the unxifs merkledag container with anything else" you lose the implicit constraints and need to redefine them somewhere ( here? )
Stepping back once again however - what is the real purpose of this change request to a strongly-ossified protocol? If it is just for ease of test fixtures - this is overkill. If there are other (future?) use-cases: please share them.
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I don't understand any of this comment. Why is that phrasing too broad?
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Checking in with the sheer passage of time here: the debated phrasing is from >3 years ago.
To contextualize that: we didn't have an IPLD Data Model spec back then (or at best it was still nascent and hotly contested). We didn't have a concept of ADL back then. I'm not the original author, but ISTM it's very likely that this was defined in terms of "merkledag" and "protobuf" not because those were critically important but simply because the terminology for that was accessible at the time and seemed sufficiently clear.
We have clear language for the Data Model now, and that means clear language for nested data structures that are agnostic of codec. Defining unixfsv1 in terms of that language is now easy and clear (and implementing it that way is also easy, as demonstrated by the PR that spawned this discussion, which is incidentally tiny -- very strong evidence of the actual simplicity of this).
It's true that unixfs is a long standing piece of history, and for most of its time it's been protobuf only. But I don't really see a reason to treat that as a sacred cow.
(And so what if the first given reason is test fixtures? That's an excellent reason. If we need a second one, I humbly submit "that it makes sense". As a third: "freedom from codecs is one of the founding principles of IPLD".)