[GNUnet-developers] Namespace discovery+navigation

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

I felt like starting another discussion on informal protocols and
such things:

Since the namespaces thing finally got into GNUnet, I've been interested
to actually see some reference to someone's namespace. But I never have.
I've found a couple of directories, which was nice and interesting, but
still no namespaces.

 From my discussion a few months back with Christian, and from reading
the new ECRS paper a couple of days ago, I understand that the only
ways you can actually *get* a namespace key, is:

-By some out-of-band means
-Be the one who creates it (really counts as the previous method)
-Find it referenced in a directory
-OK, also have some plain-text file or something shared across GNUnet,
 which is more or less equivalent to the directory method but a bit
 stupid really)

So, to try the only real in-band way of finding a namespace, I tried
doing a search for "directory". Found some directories, but no
namespaces. Perhaps there are none yet. But that's not important.

Point is, as the main way of using GNUnet will probably involve the
namespaces (so you can largely stick to content you can reasonably
trust not to be spam), people will need some reliableish way to
get access to a decent number of namespaces.

My first informal-protocol proposal:
Choose some key that people can advertise their own namespaces on.
Keys are advertised by a directory with just one entry, that is a
file in their namespace (thereby containing their namespace key).
Suggested keywords for these adverts: namespace, namespaces, or
namespace-adverts
Adverts would not be placed automatically, in case people want to
keep their namespaces largely hidden, but perhaps a simple utility
program could be made to create them (or perhaps a command-line option
for the pseudonym creation command).

Then, as these will probably get a bit crowded (and may get badly
spammed), there could be a higher-level version, whereby some people
can put up similar directories, but this time with lots of entries,
each one being into a different namespace. A bit like a little
"yellow pages" type thing. Of course, whatever key this went
under would also probably get spammed too... but you have to
start somewhere.
Suggested keywords: namespaces, namespace-collections,
namespace directory or namespace-directories.

Second issue:
It's been pointed out that the directories and namespaces system
helps to allow GNUnet to be almost like the WWW. This is very neat.
But people are used to web hosts having heirarchical directories
(well, OK, so nerds are). Whilst GNUnet's directories can actually
be arranged into pretty much any structure, it might be nice for
people to be able to think of a namespace as having a "root"
directory, that can have a hierarchy of other directories under it.

This root directory could then be expected to have a sort of
standard set of things in it and some of its subdirectories,
that people should be able to recognise.

so,
My second informal-protocol proposal:
People (who want to play nice) should insert a directory into
their namespaces under the keyword "root", or "root-directory".
This could also be the item that they use for a reference into
their namespace in their adverts.
This root directory could (should?) contain a directory of
references to other namespaces as described in the first
proposal, in order to expand upon that "yellow-pages" notion,
but with the advantage that it shouldn't be full of spam.
This should mean that once somebody has one or two namespace
references (for non-spammers, at least), they should be able
to get lots more of them easily.


So: thoughts, anybody?

Now, before I say any more, can I ask this:
Am I right in saying that the contents of any directory that
is downloaded, and the results of any search attempted, are
stored in a database, and can be redisplayed with
gnunet-directory-listdb? Only if so, it seems to work now,
but didn't seem to when I tried it a few months back, for
some reason.

Are directory contents stored in it as soon as they're downloaded,
or is it only after they're parsed with gnunet-directory-print?

 Tomble