[Help-gnunet] question about namespaces and sporadic updates

[David Roundy]

I've been having trouble insert a directory into gnunet.

I'll explain what I'd like to do,
and hopefully someone can tell me if it's possible, and if so how to go
about it.

I want to publish the contents of a directory (actually several
directories).  Mostly only new files will be added, but certain files will
be regularly modified, and others will be modified less often.  Ideally I'd
like users to be able to download the directory contents (the contents will
be a darcs repository) using something like

gnunet-download -o filename gnunet://afs/NAMESPACEHASH/path/to/file

I'm not clear, but it looks to me like instead two commands will have to be
run, one gnunet-search-sblock and one gnunet-download.

Unfortunately, even leaving out the issue of updates, I can't seem to
figure out how to get gnunet-insert to behave recursively (in the sense
that I'd expect).

If I run

# gnunet-insert -s droundy -t testing/hello ~/footest/hello

I can find the file with

$ gnunet-search-sblock 74EE46067CAB8A58D0BB4D27050EF05D425D4EC0 testing/hello
no description supplied (unknown) published by 
74EE46067CAB8A58D0BB4D27050EF05D425D4EC0
gnunet-download -o "hello" 
gnunet://afs/00750BCDA5CAC712A5A954D8C6C358DC1280A98F.B4D055772E619A0AFF9E17DB8E826B752809458A.363A3020.6

but if I try

$ gnunet-insert -s droundy -t testing2 -r ~/footest

then

gnunet-search-sblock 74EE46067CAB8A58D0BB4D27050EF05D425D4EC0 testing2/hello

doesn't find anything, but

$ gnunet-search-sblock 74EE46067CAB8A58D0BB4D27050EF05D425D4EC0 testing2

shows a directory.  Is there any way to recursively add a directory
structure to my namespace?

It would also be nice to have a flag to tell gnunet-search to exit after it
has found one reasonable match (where "reasonable" may be a bit tricky to
define).  A timeout of 1 second (and the timeout doesn't seem to accept
floating input) would add about four hours to downloading the (rather
large) repository I was considering making available via gnunet.

Perhaps I should just give up on the idea of using gnunet, since it doesn't
seem to be designed to scale for the purposes for which I'd be interested
in using it, which is as an alternative transport mechanism (that is,
alternative to http, scp, ftp etc) for darcs repositories.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs