base62 encoding fits more information into alphanumeric chars while avoiding the troublesome non-alphanumeric chars of base64 encoding. In particular, this allows us to work around the ext3 "32,000 entries in a directory" limit while retaining the convenient property that the intermediate directory names are leading prefixes of the storage index file names.
Also allow an optional leading "http://127.0.0.1:8123/uri/".
Also fix a few unit tests to generate bogus Dirnode URIs of the modern form instead of the former form.
* use new decentralized directories everywhere instead of old centralized directories
* provide UI to them through the web server
* provide UI to them through the CLI
* update unit tests to simulate decentralized mutable directories in order to test other components that rely on them
* remove the notion of a "vdrive server" and a client thereof
* remove the notion of a "public vdrive", which was a directory that was centrally published/subscribed automatically by the tahoe node (you can accomplish this manually by making a directory and posting the URL to it on your web site, for example)
* add a notion of "wait_for_numpeers" when you need to publish data to peers, which is how many peers should be attached before you start. The default is 1.
* add __repr__ for filesystem nodes (note: these reprs contain a few bits of the secret key!)
* fix a few bugs where we used to equate "mutable" with "not read-only". Nowadays all directories are mutable, but some might be read-only (to you).
* fix a few bugs where code wasn't aware of the new general-purpose metadata dict the comes with each filesystem edge
* sundry fixes to unit tests to adjust to the new directories, e.g. don't assume that every share on disk belongs to a chk file.
The URI typenames need revision, and only a few dirnode methods are
implemented. Filenodes are non-functional, but URI/key-management is in
place. There are a lot of classes with names like "NewDirectoryNode" that
will need to be rename once we decide what (if any) backwards compatibility
want to retain.
The only SHA-1 hash that remains is used in the permutation of nodeids,
where we need to decide if we care about performance or long-term security.
I suspect that we could use a much weaker hash (and faster) hash for
this purpose. In the long run, we'll be doing thousands of such hashes
for each file uploaded or downloaded (one per known peer).
This (compatibility-breaking) change moves much of the validation data and
encoding parameters out of the URI and into the so-called "thingA" block
(which will get a better name as soon as we find one we're comfortable with).
The URI retains the "storage_index" (a generalized term for the role that
we're currently using the verifierid for, the unique index for each file
that gets used by storage servers to decide which shares to return), the
decryption key, the needed_shares/total_shares counts (since they affect
peer selection), and the hash of the thingA block.
This shortens the URI and lets us add more kinds of validation data without
growing the URI (like plaintext merkle trees, to enable strong incremental
plaintext validation), at the cost of maybe 150 bytes of alacrity. Each
storage server holds an identical copy of the thingA block.
This is an incompatible change: new messages have been added to the storage
server interface, and the URI format has changed drastically.
