ipfs-rust/ipfs-embed

ipns?

iohzrd opened this issue · 5 comments

I looked through the code for the answer before asking, but nothing struck me as "obviously ipns".
Is ipns functionality on the roadmap?

I cant speak for the devs but in my opinion, I dont think ipns is high priority right now.

bahner commented

In my view it is :-) It's an integral part in distributed trusted documents. By using IPNS you can create cor DIDs with structured data. Seeing as this is an embedded IPFS implementation it's likely to not have big user databases on top and DID "user accounts" would be of great use.
As of now, I have to run 2 IPFS daemons because ipfs-embed has the fantastic notion of aliased pins, but Kubo has IPNS.

It also opens up for the possibilty for "phone home" functionality.

So +1 from me for getting IPNS in there. The issue with IPNS is often "just" the publishing part. The spec isn't that complex IMHO.

PS. I would offer to help, but my Rust skills are virtually 0.

Don't recall the exact details of ipns. But pretty sure like everything PL does it's not worth the paper the spec is printed on. If you want user choosable names for cids that are globally unique you need consensus so some kind blockchain is required. If they're scoped to a peerid, the simplest is just to ask that peer for a list of names and subscribe to updates.

What what I recall, IPNS is a bit of a misnomer, it's still a CID, it's just a multihash of a public key, and that public key can be used to update the IPFS CID that record points to. It's basically a way to introduce mutability by using public keys.

bahner commented