Metalink

[sjehuda]

Greetings.

We are having a discussion at PeeTube concerning to Metalink Chocobozzz/PeerTube#6783

I would want to know what is the extent of Metalink support of Kubo, if applicable.

[lidel]

Right now (2025Q1), Kubo does not generate Metalink files, and does not return HTTP headers defined in RFC6249.

There are some notes in issue linked below discussing the way we could expose ipfs:// and ipns:// URIs in gateway responses:

• RFC6249: Metalink/HTTP: Mirrors and Hashes  in-web-browsers#179

@sjehuda what is the use case / problem Metalink is trying to solve (was unclear from Chocobozzz/PeerTube#6783)?

• If you want to start using IPFS CIDs in Metalink files/headers produced by software other than Kubo
  • feel free to use ipfs:// and ipns:// URIs (mini spec). It is probably fine to point at https:// gateway URLs as well, but those can go away at any time (like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ did), so better to use location-agnostic ipfs:// and assume P2P software will know how to read them.

[sjehuda]

There are some notes in issue linked below discussing the way we could expose ipfs:// and ipns:// URIs in gateway responses:

ipfs/in-web-browsers#179

Thank you for the reference, because until now, I was not absolutely sure as to how this could be directly related to IPFS.

@sjehuda what is the use case / problem Metalink is trying to solve (was unclear from Chocobozzz/PeerTube#6783)?

This is specifically for PeerTube.

There are suggestions to include other P2P protocols such as eDonkey2000 (eD2k) and mostly IPFS which is very popular.

Instead, I think that it would be wiser for PeerTube to include Metalink file (RFC 5854) @metalink-dev and let each one to decide the mean (i.e. software) to obtain content from PeerTube.

• Some want to utilize Phex (Gnutella);
• some want eMule (eD2k);
• some want Kubo (IPFS);
• some want BitTorrent;
• some want Lagrange (Gemini); and
• some still utilize HTTP.

If you want to start using IPFS CIDs in Metalink files/headers produced by software other than Kubo feel free to use ipfs:// and ipns:// URIs (mini spec). It is probably fine to point at https:// gateway URLs as well, but those can go away at any time (like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ did), so better to use location-agnostic ipfs:// and assume P2P software will know how to read them.

Yes. This is what I am thinking of for Metalink files (RFC 5854).

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I have open this ticket because Mr. McDowell @ROBERT-MCDOWELL has suggested to do so, so I do what he has suggested as I suppose that he is more knowledgeable than me.

Mr. McDowell. Please participate.