STreaming ARchives: stricter, verifiable, deterministic, highly compressible alternatives to CAR files for atproto repositories.
atproto
car
sure
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readme.md
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readme.md
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_status: just thinking about it_
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STAR is an archival format for Merkle Search Trees (MSTs) as implemented in atproto. It offers efficient key-orderd streaming of repository contents and reduced archive size compared to CARs.
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STAR is an archival format for Merkle Search Trees (MSTs) as implemented in atproto. It offers efficient key-ordered streaming of repository contents and reduced archive size compared to CARs.
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- convertible to/from CAR (lossless except any out-of-tree blocks from a CAR)
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- extra garbage strictly not allowed (unlike CAR)
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It might be difficult to convert a STAR to stream-friendly (preorder traversal) CAR format, since the CID of each MST node block can only be computed after visiting all of its children.
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STAR (could)[https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3mcv4zxwtgs2w] require that MST nodes above a certain depth store their own CIDs which would be sad but pragmatic.
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## format
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