Terminology

To stay sane and communicate effectively we try hard to use consistent terminology throughout the pieces of the project. Please let us know if things here are confusing or lacking.

blob

an immutable sequence of 0 or more bytes, with no extra metadata

blobref

a reference to a blob, consisting of a cryptographic hash function name and that hash function's digest of the blob's bytes, in hex. Examples of valid blobrefs include:

     sha1-f1d2d2f924e986ac86fdf7b36c94bcdf32beec15
     md5-d3b07384d113edec49eaa6238ad5ff00
     sha256-b5bb9d8014a0f9b1d61e21e796d78dccdf1352f23cd32812f4850b878ae4944c

Concatenating the two together with a hyphen is the common representation, with both parts in all lower case.

blob server

the simplest and lowest layer of the Camlistore servers. A blob server, while potentially shared between users, is logically private to a single user and holds that user's blobs (whatever they may represent).