In light of the discussion and somewhat urgent need for a standard on how
meta-data for Freenet documents should be handled, that culminated in the (by
some, perhaps premature, but I am hesitant to criticize any programming that is
actually done) implementation of storeable fields by Theo this weekend, we (the
admins: Ian, Brandon and I) have made a decision on how it should be handled
for now.
Storeable fields are a good thing. They can provide the sort of Meta-data that
is of use to the network, but still needs to be stored with the data. For
example the actual signatures for any kind of Signature Verifying Keys would
need to be stored as storeable data, as would the part hashes or at least size
of each part in a two level content hash system, as would an "expires" date or
something like that.
However, their overuse is not a good thing, since they cannot easily be
encrypted, and the network is burdened with tossing around a bunch of data that
only ever concerns the clients.
So the standard we will follow for now is: Storeable fields stay, but they
should not contain any meta-data that is content information or gives away what
the data is (including things like filetype, mime-type, etc). Instead, such
data should be appended before the document like Ian originally wanted, and so
that it may one day be possible to request the content-information without
requesting the actual data, there should be a storeable field that contains the
length, in bytes, of the meta-data part of the trailing field (when we
implement encryption of the trailing field, we just have to make sure this
covers the entire last meta-data block). Call the field Storeable.InfoLength.
I don't think we need to debate this any more. Any radical ideas such as
keeping the meta-data separate or whatever are pushed to the future, and we
will stick to this for now. What needs to be discussed instead the format of
those first N bytes of the trailing field.
I hope everyone is more or less satisfied with this, and that we can move on to
making the format decisions ASAP.
--
Oskar Sandberg
md98-osa at nada.kth.se
#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
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