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[GNUnet-developers] New GNUnet publication program


From: Kenneth Almquist
Subject: [GNUnet-developers] New GNUnet publication program
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 03:33:00 -0400

I've written a variant of gnunet-insert, which I've named gnunet-pub.
The key idea is to split the publishing operation into two steps:
1)  Determine precisely what to publish, and
2)  Actually publish it.

A given call to gnunet-pub can perform one or both of these steps.
If you say

    gnunet-pub -o spec file...

gnunet-pub will write a publication specification to the file spec.
You can then say

    gnunet-pub -i spec -P

where the -P option tells gnunet-pub to actually publish the files
to GNUnet.  The command

    gnunet-pub -P file...

will perform both operations in one step.

This has a number of benefits.

The first is transparency.  The user can create a specification file
and then see exactly what will be published, before performing the
publication.  I feel that this is quite important because publishing
is an irreversible operation.

The second benefit is that the front end (the part of gnunet-pub
which generates the specification) can easily be replaced.  There
is no need to use a programming language that can interface to C;
any programming language that is capable of writing a text file
can be used.  And testing is straightforward, because all you have
to do is look at the text file generated by the front end to see
if it is correct.

A third benefit is that, if the user retains the specification file
and the published data files, the published content can be recreated.
This makes it simple to re-publish content if the GNUnet server's
data base ever crashes.

The ability to recreate published content has other possible uses.
Currently, you can unindex a file, but the IBlocks and search records
pointing to the file will still be in your data base.  With a
spacification file, it would be possible to delete all of the
published blocks using the DELETE message in the FS client-server
protocol.

Conversely, you might want to be sure that the blocks you have
published are still in the server data base, and haven't been pushed
out by other content, or deleted due to software bugs or hardware
glitches.  If the FS client-server protocol were enhanced to include
a query to determine whether a block was in the data base, you could
periodically check whether all of the data you published was still in
the data base.


To get the code, documentation, and test cases:

1)  Go to a directory containing the GNUnet source, then cd to
    src/applications/fs.

2)  Download http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeefhzu/gnunet-pub.tar.bz2

3)  Untar the file.  This will create src/applications/fs/gnunet-pub.

There are probably a number of issues with this code due to the lack
of a complete design before coding.  On the other hand, I think that
the set of test cases is large enough to ensure basic usability.  All
feedback welcome.

 - Kenneth Almqist


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