* backups now share dirnodes with any previous backup, in any location,
so renames and moves are handled very efficiently
* "tahoe backup" no longer bothers reading the previous snapshot
* if you switch grids, you should delete ~/.tahoe/private/backupdb.sqlite,
to force new uploads of all files and directories
In an ancient version of directories, we needed a MAC on each entry. In modern times, the entire dirnode comes with a digital signature, so the MAC on each entry is redundant.
With this patch, we no longer check those MACs when reading directories, but we still produce them so that older readers will accept directories that we write.
Now upload or encode methods take a required argument named "convergence" which can be either None, indicating no convergent encryption at all, or a string, which is the "added secret" to be mixed in to the content hash key. If you want traditional convergent encryption behavior, set the added secret to be the empty string.
This patch also renames "content hash key" to "convergent encryption" in a argument names and variable names. (A different and larger renaming is needed in order to clarify that Tahoe supports immutable files which are not encrypted content-hash-key a.k.a. convergent encryption.)
This patch also changes a few unit tests to use non-convergent encryption, because it doesn't matter for what they are testing and non-convergent encryption is slightly faster.
* 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).
In various cases, including Merkle Trees, it is useful to tag and encode the inputs to your secure hashes to prevent security flaws due to ambiguous meanings of hash values.