in the recent reconciliation of webopen patches, I wound up adjusting
webopen to 'pass through' the state of the trailing slash on the given
argument to the resultant url passed to the browser. this change
removes the requirement that arguments must be directories, and allows
webopen to be used with files. it also broke the tests that assumed
that webopen would always normalise the url to have a trailing slash.
in fixing the tests, I realised that, IMHO, there's something deeply
awry with the way tahoe handles paths; specifically in the combination
of '/' being the name of the root path within an alias, but a leading
slash on paths, e.g. 'alias:/path', is catagorically incorrect. i.e.
'tahoe:' == 'tahoe:/' == '/'
but 'tahoe:/foo' is an invalid path, and must be 'tahoe:foo'
I wound up making the internals of webopen simply spot a 'path' of
'/' and smash it to '', which 'fixes' webopen to match the behaviour
of tahoe's path handling elsewhere, but that special case sort of
points to the weirdness.
(fwiw, I personally found the fact that the leading / in a path was
disallowed to be weird - I'm just used to seeing paths qualified by
the leading / I guess - so in a debate about normalising path handling
I'd vote to include the /)
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.
* rename my_private_dir.cap to root_dir.cap
* move it into the private subdir
* change the cmdline argument "--root-uri=[private]" to "--dir-uri=[root]"
* 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.
