Re: [Help-gnunet] Questions on latest version

[Christian Grothoff]

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On Sunday 31 August 2003 04:17 pm, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:
> Hi all,
>  Been a while, but I was pleased to see 0.5.5 released with the namespacey
> stuff in it. 2 questions though:
>
> -Some time ago, Nils (IIRC) made a patch for making search keywords case
>  -insensitive. Someone else pointed out that I'd made a page of suggested
>  netiquette for Gnunet, with a recommendation of what case to use for
>  various keywords.
>  But I'd only done that to try to make sure people would end up using the
>  smae case for their keywords, and afterwards, I wasn't quite satisfied
>  that it would work out for the best.
>  So basically, did Nils' patch get included in the end?

Yes, but it was recently (post 0.5.5) moved to the libextractor CVS. It will 
be in the next libextractor relase and was part of 0.5.5. The 0.5.5 default 
config file has the appropriate line:

EXTRACTORS = libextractor_filename:-libextractor_split:-libextractor_lower

> -So I understand that it's namespaces that allow updates, and it's
>  directories that allow you to create heirarchies.
>  But how do the directories reference stuff?

They contain RBlocks or SBlocks in plaintext (the file-identification plus 
meta-data). Insert a bunch of files and go into gnunet-gtk. Build a directory 
"by hand", you should see that it is quite easy.

>  I'm basically wondering, if I make a directory entry that links to a
>  directory in someone else's namespace, when that remote directory gets
>  *updated*, will the reference to it from my directory access the one
>  it found originally, or the newly updated one??

Ok, someone else has a directory D in a namespace X under the namespace-key  
K.  Now when you create your own directory O which can contain either a 
direct link to D (which means that if D is updated, your link will still 
point to the OLD contents, which is what you may want); or you can link to K 
in X, which means that your directory will point to the updateable version of 
the directory. 

Essentially, every directory (and file) can be accessed in two ways; with an 
RBlock (the old, keyword, immutable mechanism) or via an SBlock (the new, 
additional, optionally updateable, signed mechanism). Directories can refer 
to both RBlocks and SBlocks.

Does that help? (Note that gnunet-gtk's visualization of the difference 
between RBlocks and SBlocks is, well, lacking.)

Christian
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