On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 05:57:34PM +0200, Martin Uecker wrote:

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 11:28:20AM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

quoted

Yes, I guess this is the detail I was going to abandon. =)

I viewed the fact that the top-level hash was dependent on the exact chunk 
makeup a 'misfeature', because it doesn't allow easy interoperability with 
existing non-chunked repos.

I thought this as a misfeature too before I realized how
many advantages this has.

To make it more clear: Ofcourse it is a bug if the
hash depends on unimportant implementation details.

But a hash which is calculated recusively from
subhashes is a lot more usefull than a hash
which can only be calculated from the entire data
at once. And if this hash can be recalculated
cheaply from subhashes even if some data was
inserted somewhere this is an even more usefull
thing.

Martin

-- 
One night, when little Giana from Milano was fast asleep,
she had a strange dream.