Spec refining: Terminology IPLD vs Merkle

[nicola]

I see a lot of different names being used: IPLD pointers/path, (mostly used by me), Merkle-links, Merkle-pointers & so on.

Prefixing things with merkle

I am personally not a big fan of calling all these things merkle-*, since they have little and little to do with what Merkle originally meant with his Merkle trees. However, I do see a general trend in calling these Merke Dags & so on even in different projects. Then, it maybe a good idea to explain IPLD as a standard for Merkle Dags (however this may be very narrow, there is a lot more! authenticated data structures!). However, understanding "Merkle Dag" can be more difficult to understand than "replacing links with hashes".

Prefixing things with IPLD

I would not recommend renaming everything with an IPLD prefix, except if it is IPLD specific - or unless we want the IPLD name to be used more than the Merkle name.

Here is somehow what I suggest (which is very similar to the existing spec)

• $hash_pointers/path: $cid_hash + $path (better than merkle path)
• $path: /something/but/not/hashes/here.png (already an IETF spec)
• hash-link: when using the pointer to link different objects - the hash-link is really the link object {'/': $hash_pointer}
• merkle-dag: graph of objects linked with hashes

We could use IPLD pointers/path and IPLD links to imply a specific way to implement Merkle/Hash links.

Other that will keep the IPLD name:

• IPLD data model
• IPLD serialization

[rvagg]

Closing due to staleness as per team agreement to clean up the issue tracker a bit (ipld/team-mgmt#28). This doesn't mean this issue is off the table entirely, it's just not on the current active stack but may be revisited in the near future. If you feel there is something pertinent here, please speak up, reopen, or open a new issue. [/boilerplate]