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

[Joe Armstrong]

You're quite right - you need to know in advance the checksum of the data.

But obtaining the checksum from "somewhere" is orthogonal to the problem
of storing or obtaining the data. Indexing etc. is completely different problem.

/Joe

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 11:23 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>