How does IPNS work?

[rklaehn]

This discussion contains some info regarding how IPNS currently works and what its limitations are.

@aeftimia

I could not find any complete spec on how it is actually implemented. I’ve been trying to navigate the implementations and figure out the code structure, and I figured this was probably best left as a community question. I’d greatly appreciate a pointer to name query and resolution is in Go or Node implementations.

I have been looking at the go implementation, since that is what we use. The ipns stuff can be found in https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/tree/master/namesys

not sure about the js impl, but the package structure should be similar.