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Last updated: 2025-07-14T11:48:38Z

I don't really like add_protected, but I also don't have a better solution right now. Maybe we add it and then strongly discourage using it or mark it as unstable somehow?

After thinking about this a bit, the best thing to do in the long term would be for docs to store small blobs inline and just bypass blobs entirely, then just use blobs for large blobs. The downside is of course that the small blobs stored in docs won't be available via the blobs API, but I think that is quite reasonable.

For large blobs, docs would then use the normal mechanisms (tags and temp tags) to keep the blobs alive, and the overhead would be acceptable because this would be only for a small subset of blobs.

Can you explain a bit why you don't like the idea of externally protecting blobs from gc long-term? To me it still looks appealing - it solves the iroh-docs usecase in a rather straightforward way, and I can see other crates building on blobs having use for this as well. If you have external datastructures that maintain their own garbage collection (like docs) it seems elegant to not have to maintain tags as well.