block.rm() is missing :(

[mikeal]

Was surprised to find that this API was missing. It's in the go ipfs command line but isn't in js-ipfs-api and isn't documented in https://github.com/ipfs/interface-ipfs-core/blob/master/SPEC/BLOCK.md

[daviddias]

Interesting, this must be new. I remember specifically implementing this endpoint for js-ipfs and then later removing as go-ipfs team was uncomfortable (@whyrusleeping) having a command that would delete something from the store without passing through the pinning/gc.

It seems it got added meanwhile. @whyrusleeping @Stebalien shall we just implement it? This is a quick one :)

[whyrusleeping]

@diasdavid yeah. The command was implemented with the caveat that it do a pin check on that hash. Which makes it really slow.

[whyrusleeping]

In general, if youre using ipfs block rm its likely you are doing something wrong.

[mikeal]

That's good to know, and should probably be in the docs. It means that, for the specific use case I had for this, it's actually not usable.

[whyrusleeping]

Yeah, and i just noticed a typo in the helptext too. Ripe for a PR

[0x-r4bbit]

Hi,

maybe I can help out with this one. Do I get it right that everybody here agreed block.rm() should be implemented?

I'm not super familiar with the Block APIs yet, but I can read it up and give it a spin.

[0x-r4bbit]

Alright, I looked into what a Block is and it turns out that this should be a trivial thing to do. In fact, block.rm() is implemented in js-ipfs and pretty straight forward.

It's not as straight forward in js-ipfs-api though as we'll have to send a request to a node to perform the deletion. While there's APIs to send single files or multiple files, there's no API yet to perform a deletion request.

Is sendRequest() the API we wanna use for that?

Any pointers would be appreciated :)

Thanks!