Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> It is not possible to synchronize or version a dataset in this way in IPFS without implementing such functionality yourself

But why not build version control on top of IPFS?

It has been discussed here: [1]. It seems a matter of correctly working with immutable data structures (which IPFS provides storage for). And it seems a bit silly to rebuild that storage layer from scratch.

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/83

View on HN

From what I've read and seen in the docs, faq, presentations, etc., it appears to me that IPFS really pulls in a lot of stuff about the network layer, because it's trying to be, well, an Interplanetary (distributed) File System.

DAT is fundamentally a portable, self-contained, data repository. Replicating DAT archives across a broad network and whatnot is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, but IMO that should be solved at a different layer, without rolling in all sorts of complecting concerns such as network ports, routing, and payments for storage and whatnot.

Yes, agreed. Of course overlap among projects is inevitable and it would be nice if there was more effort to coordinate and collaborate as this would allow for potential dev efficiencies (not guaranteed though). In this case, DAT is a practical and pragmatic approach where IPFS is more hinged in the crypto blockchain token space which can be a turn-off and add unnecessary baggage. The DAT and Beaker teams don't want to add that noise and have different philosophies, so it is better for now that these projects are independent and in future can assess and maybe a new project will treat both as prior art and converge the best parts. And around we go.

Ya, we've thought about that. Dat's storage is pretty flexible and we have a content-addressed storage library. A lot of our users do not want or need to storage data in IPFS though so it adds unnecessary complexity to do that by default.

Someone could built a storage that uses IPFS, similar to our dat-http storage [1].

[1] https://github.com/datproject/dat-http

Reply on news.ycombinator.com