[erlang-questions] simple virtual file system in Erlang?

Richard A. O'Keefe ok@REDACTED
Mon Mar 27 23:23:50 CEST 2017


> On 27/03/2017, at 4:31 AM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> To store <blob>,  then later
> 
>   GET /blob/sha256/<SHA>
> 
> to recover the blob. <SHA> is the SHA256 checksum of the data (the
> path contains the
> type of the checksum - so you might say GETblob/md5/<MD5CHECKSUM>

It seems to me that this amounts to using a checksum of the contents
of a file instead of an inode number.

What I don't understand is how I would ever use this.
When I go looking for a file, I want its *contents*,
which I don't know, otherwise I wouldn't need it.
So I *can't* compute its checksum.  With things like
Spotlight, I can use a known *part* of the content to
look for the rest of the content, but again, if I
already knew enough of the content to compute the
checksum, I wouldn't bother looking at the file.

The only way I can think of to use something like this
is to maintain some sort of name-based directory
structure on top, or some sort of IR-like inverted index
based on part of the content.





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