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

[Michael Truog]

On 03/27/2017 02:23 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe 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.
>
>
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Yes, it is normally for a name-based directory related to peer-to-peer file sharing.  The links have been called "magnet links" as described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme .