WEEK 7 QUESTIONS | May 17 - May 23, 2021

[Discordian]

WEEK 7 QUESTIONS | May 17 - May 23, 2021 (times are in EST)

Week 7 is here! I’ve attempted to highlight interesting or common questions. This week I found a couple interesting unanswered questions. I’ve also included a long one about how to reliably make content available in-browser using js-ipfs, and a StackOverflow question asking about symbolic links in MFS.

Questions

unbeatable-101 asked “I cannot browse my files from the IPFS app” (forum - 20:06 May 19)

@anon47005736

I’ve tried restarting the node and app multiple times

@anon47005736

I just removed my ipfs folders in ~/ and it worked again (But with all my files gone)

Observation:

I wonder what caused this. I’m assuming a configuration change of somesort .

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nickreserved asked “When file added?” (forum - 16:32 May 19)

@nickreserved

Is it possible for IPFS to return the timestamp or datetime of a file’s addition?
Or I must log it alone?

The same for “ipfs name publish”.

Basically, ipfs keeps time of an action or not?

I need this for synchronization.

Observation:

As far as I know such a feature doesn’t exist … yet, you’d have to implement tracking in your own application. zacharywhitley points out there’s a bounty for a similar feature, too:

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6920

Cool!

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BnMcGn asked “IPFS: Symbolic links in MFS” (StackOverflow - 17:24 May 14)

Is there a symlink equivalent for IPFS’s Mutable File System? For example, if I have a file:

/source/file.txt 

and I copy it another folder:

ipfs files cp /source/file.txt /reference/file.txt

the two files will refer to the same object. If I make a change to /source/file.txt the copy in /reference/file.txt will still point to the old version. Is there a good way to make it point to the current version of the file in /source/ ?

I could keep track of all the copies and update them whenever I change the original, but that doesn’t sound fun. I could also store the string “/source/file.txt” in /reference/file.txt and manually dereference each time I want to access the file. Better, but still cumbersome. Are there any other options?

Observation:

This feature sounds really useful. Does anyone know if it exists? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen others looking for this too .

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novaknole asked “How to upload file to IPFS with only front-end” (forum - 14:00 May 14)

@novaknole

Question 1. I want to confirm something. does IPFS.create create a node in the browser and that’s how it starts to work ? Is this stable and performant ? since node(i don’t mean node.js ) is running in browser, maybe it’s not performant. What do you think ?

Question 2. if IPFS.create creates a node in the browser, I guess, when I refresh the page and that code again gets executed, old node dies and new one gets created. is this performant ?

There are many more questions after this too!

Observation:

This is a lovely thread. Effectively they want to be able to ensure their files being added via js-ipfs are reachable, and we go step-by-step into how. zacharywhitley suggested using the IPFS Pinning Service API, and that really kicked off progress .