INN over IPFS?

Sun Dec 15 14:42:26 UTC 2024

I was specifically wondering about the experiment of backing newspools with IPFS - I'm pretty sure I read about this a while back - and was wondering if anybody had any more details.

As a transport, that's a whole different matter.  What we're talking about there is a single replicated spool file per newsgroup.  And working out a way to post to it like a CRDT log file.  That's a separate set of issues.  But it does raise the question:  Is there a canonical URL format for https access to a news spool?

Thanks,

Miles

________________________________
From: inn-workers <inn-workers-bounces at lists.isc.org> on behalf of Martin Burmester <martin at burmester.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2024 7:58 AM
To: inn-workers at lists.isc.org <inn-workers at lists.isc.org>
Subject: Re: INN over IPFS?

Hi,

Am 06.12.2024 um 10:39 schrieb Jason Evans:
> On 12/4/24 2:00 AM, Grant Taylor wrote:
>> As has been discussed (at length) on other lists, IPFS is meant for
>> FILES.
>>
>> As such, just about anything and everything that has Protocol in it's
>> name is not natively compatible with a file system as it's
>> communications mechanism.
>>
>> You could probably store a traditional news spool on IPFS, but it
>> would almost certainly be inherently single point of update to avoid
>> issues with overview databases and article numbers, etc.
>>
>> But you probably could get traditional news clients that read from the
>> raw news spool to read articles.  I have no idea how the posting would
>> go because that will almost certainly involve <something> Protocol
>> <maybe something else>.
>
> I was thinking the same thing. I really like the idea of distributed
> news articles but this would mean writing something from scratch. If you
> were to go down this rabbit hole, I would suggest reading the main NNTP
> RFCs to get a good understanding and then go from there. I think you
> would definitely need to introduce a universal article identifier and I
> don't know if the "message-id" could do that.

What you can probably do is write out uucp batch files periodically and
store them in ipfs, other systems could look regularly and import the
batches via rnews. Wouldnt have to reinvent the wheel but start from
send-uucp and adapt it. Its one way only though.

Cheers,
Martin

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