[tahoe-dev] some questions, oh and hi :)

[zooko]

On Jan 8, 2008, at 1:37 PM, Joshua Teitelbaum wrote:

> First and foremost, hi all.

Hi, Joshua Teitelbaum!

> From my cursory understanding, the VDrive is just an aggregation of  
> URI's in a flat file on the user's disk.

Do you know where you got this idea?  It's not true.  There is no  
aggregation of URIs anywhere in Tahoe.  (Although it is possible that  
users are aggregating URIs.  Hm -- I have three of them in my Firefox  
bookmarks, for example.)

Frankly, I don't understand what our code and docs mean when they use  
the word "vdrive".  To me, there are directories, there is the  
transitive closure of a directory (i.e. a "subtree"), and then there  
is the entire set of all extant directories and files (i.e. a  
"filesystem").  To me, there is no "vdrive" anywhere in Tahoe,  
although in the future a Windows user will be able to access a Tahoe  
filesystem through the Windows VFS layer, in which case there will be  
a Windows drive (i.e. a Thing With A Drive Letter) which is a  
"virtual drive" (i.e. it isn't backed solely by a local device).

Now, the other Tahoe hackers do seem to use "vdrives" to describe  
things in Tahoe, and my best guess as to what they mean is "A Tahoe  
subtree which is accessed from outside of Tahoe.".  Brian: could you  
please post what you mean by "vdrive"?

> Is there any service, could there be any service, that keeps/syncs  
> this drive metadata on behalf of the user, so that in the event of  
> a local disk crash, the user can go to a service and pick up their  
> metadata.

There certainly could be such a service.  The metadata in question  
can be as small as the capability to a single directory, provided  
that all of the user's stuff is reachable from that directory.   
Allmydata.com -- the company that sponsors Tahoe -- will probably  
offer a commercial service like this in the future.

Regards,

Zooko