• Table of contents
• Keep manifest format
  • Manifest v1
  • Normalized manifest v1
  • Manifest v2

Keep manifest format¶

Manifest v1¶

A manifest is utf-8 encoded text, consisting of zero or more newline-terminated streams.

Each stream consists of three or more space-delimited tokens:

• The first token is a stream name, consisting of one or more path components, delimited by "/".
  • The first path component is always ".".
  • No path component is empty.
  • No path component is "." or "..".
  • The stream name never begins or ends with "/".
• The second token is a data blob locator (see Keep locator format).
• ...possibly followed by more data blob locators...
• The first token that is not a block locator, and all subsequent tokens, are file tokens.
  • A file token has three parts, delimited by ":": position, size, filename.
  • Position and size are given in decimal, and are counted from the beginning of the first data blob.
  • Filename may contain "/" characters, but must not start or end with "/", and must not contain "//".
  • Filename components (delimited by "/") must not be "." or "..".

A manifest contains no TAB characters, nor other ASCII whitespace characters other than the spaces or newline delimiters specified above.

A manifest always ends with a newline -- except the empty (zero-length) string, which is a valid manifest.

Normalized manifest v1¶

A normalized manifest has the following additional restrictions.

• Streams are in alphanumeric order.
• Each stream name is unique within the manifest.
• Files within a stream are in alphanumeric order.
• Concatenation stream_name/filename is unique within the manifest. (This can be impossible to accomplish without rewriting blobs.)
• Filename must not contain "/".

An API call exists will exist to normalize a manifest.

Request:

• POST /arvados/v1/collections/{hash}/normalize
• request body: {"collection":{"manifest_text":"...."}}

Response:

• {"uuid":"...","manifest_text":"..."}

Notes:

• POST despite no side effects.
• Returns object with uuid even though no object was stored.

Manifest v2¶

(Early design stages)

Should probably include:

• Structured format (JSON?)
• More than one level of indirection (e.g., manifest references block X, which references data blocks A,B,C)
• Specify hash algorithm with block hashes