Remove support for old-style links

[vmx]

Currently there's still support for old style {"/": "base-encoded-cid"} style links. I think we should remove the support for this, so that consumers don't have "silent" breakage where a serialisation works as before, but de-serialisation doesn't.

[mikeal]

I'm +1 on doing this after js-ipfs has moved completely to the new API.

Enforcing a symmetrical encode/decode seems like a good idea and the new IPLD specs have abandoned any "canonical" format.

[vmx]

Done with the release of version 0.14.

[alanshaw]

We implemented dag put on the CLI but because ipld-dag-cbor no longer supports this format for linking no links can be made:

$ echo '{ "link": { "/": "bafyreidl34zuzoltv3ijlunrilncnzmczx53lfco4dzc6o77xy2f4dq7ce" } }' | ipfs dag put

Obviously we can't pass CID instances to IPLD from the CLI.

We're going to patch js-ipfs to convert these objects into CID instances until go-ipfs drops support for this.

Other ideas welcome!

[mikeal]

You should be able to just decode the JSON w/ the dag-json parser and then pass the decoded object on to whatever encoder they actually want. That link format is still the internal dag-json link format so it should work.

[alanshaw]

I think this is a good shout, but dag-json is not currently a dependency so I'm hesitant to add it.

[mikeal]

You could just wait until you take the new Block API, dag-json is in the default set of codecs and there’s better support for selectively including codecs when you want to trim the bundle.

In general, we should find creative ways to dynamically load the codecs we need instead of bundling them. If this feature is only needed by the CLI then we should pull that codec into the CLI utility and not into the entire default IPLD API.