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design document for verified relaxed urls

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Sponsored-by: Graham Spencer on Patreon
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Joey Hess 2024-02-10 10:48:20 -04:00
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Adding a relaxed url currently prevents verifying the content of the object
when transferring it between repositories. This risks data corruption going
unnoticed. Could the hash be recorded when a relaxed url is downloaded from
the web, and then used for verification of other transfers?
This would need a new per-key file in the git-annex branch, that can list
one or more hash-based keys. Then implement verification for url keys, that
checks if hash-based keys are recorded in the file, and if so uses them to
verify the content.
The web special remote can hash the content as it's downloading it from the
web, and record the resulting hash-based key.
## handling upgrades
A repository that currently contains the content of a relaxed url needs to
keep working. So, the object stored in the repository has to be treated as
valid, even though it does not correspond to any hash-based keys listed for
the url key.
This presents a problem; there is no way to tell the difference between
a valid object in such a repository and an object that was downloaded from
the web with its hash recorded, but has since gotten corrupted.
Seems that the only possible way to resolve this problem is to change to a
new type of url key, that is known to always have its hash recorded on
download from the web. (Call this a "dynamic" url key.)
And handle all existing relaxed url keys as before.
That would leave it up to the user to migrate their relaxed url keys to
dynamic urls keys, if desired.
## other special remotes
If the web special remote is what takes care of hashing the content on
download and recording the hash-based key, what about other special remotes
that claim an url?
This could also be implemented in the bittorrent special remote, but what
about external special remotes?
An alternative would be to add a downloadDynamicUrl that is called instead
of retrieveKeyFile and returns a hash-based key (allowing hashing the
download on the fly). Then git-annex would take
care of recording the hash-based key. The external special remote interface
could be extended to include that.
## hash-based key choice
Should annex.backend gitconfig be used to pick which hash-based key to use?
The risk is that config changes and several different hash-based keys get
recorded for a dynamic url. Not really a problem, but would increase the
size of the git-annex branch unncessarily, and require extra work when
verifying the key.)
## use for other types of keys
It would also be possible to use these new git-annex branch log files
for other types of keys, like WORM, or perhaps SHA1. But, the same upgrade
problem would apply. So, there's problably no benefit in doing that,
compared with migrating the key to the desired hash backend.
Does seem to be some chance this could help implementing
[[wishlist_degraded_files]].