I think we will eventually need to support dangling ref pointers in Noms. For example, we will need to support something analogous to Git's shallow clones. In that case, I wonder if we can implement excision using the same idea. You can actually remove chunks from the db and replace them with some kind of tombstone that indicates they've been removed or are purposely absent.
aboodman
commented
7 years ago
We will eventually implement GC, which will allow deletion of datasets and any orphaned data.
But what if you need to permanently get rid of data, independent of any datasets that reference it?
Datomic supports something for that use case: http://docs.datomic.com/excision.html.
I think we will eventually need to support dangling ref pointers in Noms. For example, we will need to support something analogous to Git's shallow clones. In that case, I wonder if we can implement excision using the same idea. You can actually remove chunks from the db and replace them with some kind of tombstone that indicates they've been removed or are purposely absent.