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A comment on Distributing NixOS with IPFS. Parent comment

Re:Distributing NixOS with IPFS by lgierth on Thursday January 19, 2017 @11:13PM (#13441683)
> Also, when interfacing with legacy systems like git repos, one needs to dereference a legacy hash without knowing what it points to, which is easiest done with custom schemas.

The CID (address format) in IPLD doesn't represent types of systems, but it represents types of data structures. E.g. in the case of git, it's not "git,$thehash", but instead "git-tree,$thehash" or "git-commit,$thehash".

That way you know which code you'll need to run once you have the object's payload, or you could have datastores that simply pull blocks out of a git repo.

Is this getting closer to what you mean?

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Re:Distributing NixOS with IPFS by Ericson2314 on Friday January 20, 2017 @11:02AM (#13444702)
Yeah, my OP was saying what's happened to CID. I guess it's been implemented without finishing off the spec :/.

While I'm not opposed to treating git that way, do note that git hashes are specifically constructed by prefixing the serialization of blobs, trees, and commits separately so that collisions are not likely.

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