Is there/where can I find the official UnixFSv2 spec?

I’ve been looking around GitHub trying to find the current specification for UnixFSv2 but I can’t seem to find anything that isn’t ‘archived’. Has an official UnixFSv2 spec been created? Is there a current working revision that isn’t ‘archived’?

1 Like

UnixFSv2, as of today, is more of a placeholder name for a series of desires, than it is a specific thing with implementations.

Specifically: UnixFSv2 is the dream of creating a standard for describing filesystems, and their metadata, while reusing existing IPLD codecs rather than introducing new ones.

(I think that describes some good goalposts, for what it’s worth!)

Thereafter, things get more complicated, and opinions will begin to vary. For example, depending on who you ask, opinions about “how much metadata” and how it should be formatted will vary, as will opinions on how exactly tools should support all those various metadata, what the behaviour should be if some tool can’t operate with the combination of some of the encoded metadata vs what the host filesystem supports, etc. Here be various dragons. :slight_smile:

I’ve written several gists about this myself. The key idea in each of them was to ensure we describe a general system, and don’t overspecify the attributes. There is no code that I know of backing any of these ideas, but if you find them of interest, here they are:

(I think there’s the kernel of good ideas in those gists, but haven’t got the time to pursue it much myself. I’d love it if someone picked up the ideas and runs with them!)

So:

Has an official UnixFSv2 spec been created?

Long story short – no.

I think if anyone in the broader community and ecosystem wants to work on a filesystem description standard, they should feel free to do so. (Experimentation is good!)

1 Like

Thank you for the detailed response!