Well, renaming files should not be an issue today, given that files should be identified by their content (i.e. their SHA1 signature or the associated URN), rather than by their name.
The file name used to be necessary in old versions of Gnutella to download files by names, but this method is largely deprecated due to various filename encoding issues.
Renaming a file normally does not change its content, so it is safe for swarmed downloads (of course it will only change the name under which a file can be found for new incoming searches, but this won't harm incoming download requests by URN)
On the opposite, editing meta-data MAY change the file content and require it to be rehashed (for example when editing MP3 meta-data), meaning that the file will no longer be delivered for incoming download requests by URN (replying with 404 not found).
One bad thing is that some servents (GTKG?) attempts to retry the download when a download by content digest URN fails with 404 status, by using the old deprecated method of download by name, and if thy want swarmed downloads, the file will appear corrupted.
My opinion is that we should no longer accept incoming download requests by name, in all modern servents that supports downloads by content digest URN (we should return 404 not found if we have an URN for the file that may have been modified with its URN adjusted accordingly).
Well, you can still rename files in your OS browser, but there happens some quirks in LimeWire, because it does not detect the name change immediately. The only way to recover is to force it to refresh the directory, so that it will see the new name, will recompute the file hash (LimeWire does not know it is the same file content as before it was renamed), and then see the matching URN that can be honored again for incoming transfer requests.
But I have seen that this still leaves the file in red (unshared), if you don't refresh also the "Shared files" filtered list in the LimeWire Library.
Note however that you won't be able to rename a file as long as a upload or play is in progress. But the safest place to rename a file should be the LimeWire library, and not the Explorer, as long as LimeWire does not include a monitor for OS notifications about changes in the monitored folder. This monitoring option exists on Windows and probbly not on Linux (don't know about Mac OSX). If this monitoring was effective, we could rename safely all files from the Explorer, because LimeWire (in fact the Java Filesystem integration classes) would receive those notifications.
Last edited by verdyp; October 8th, 2004 at 09:48 AM.
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