IPNS pubsub and initial resolution

[adin]

You may want to check out Understanding guarantees of the improved IPNS over pubsub and more precisely the IPNS over PubSub spec.

Quick overview is:

@zacharywhitley

I’m assuming that the room name is somehow included in the IPNS record so someone knows where to listen for updates.

The pubsub topic is calculated from the IPNS name. I’d differentiate name from record, as the record contains the current thing the IPNS name is pointing to along with other information like the record number and signature.

@zacharywhitley

Is the initial resolution standard IPNS? If so is it correct that the initial resolution may be slow and IPNS pubsub would only be fast for updates?

This was true until go-ipfs v0.5.0. Since v0.5.0 the initial resolution is now fast since peers can directly query each other for these IPNS over PubSub records so you don’t have to wait on a republish to learn about the record (more details in the spec)