Automate codec updates across libraries

[lidel]

Right now we need to manually update tables in JS/GO implementations:

• GO: https://github.com/ipfs/go-cid/blob/85cd30874e614c61d6dd82d991878d84053fd579/cid.go#L52-L110
• JS:
  • https://github.com/multiformats/js-multicodec#updating-the-lookup-table
  • https://github.com/multiformats/js-multihash/blob/e850f682b0368a759391f7f72343019ff23a2775/src/constants.js

This is pretty bad for IPFS/IPLD ecosystem because we often run into situation where different implementations understand different subset of the table (recent example: multiformats/multihash#129 (comment) + multiformats/js-multicodec#62).

Here is an idea:

Create a Github Action that runs daily, detects multicodec table changes and either opens issues or PRs against client repos.

cc @ribasushi @vmx @rvagg @aschmahmann @jacobheun @olizilla @autonome

Thoughts?

[aschmahmann]

Seems reasonable to me. I recall @mikeal wanted to go about this in a different way though especially for JS, by making the codecs you pull into your library more configurable. IIUC the purpose was to decrease the bundle size of applications, but I'll let him correct me and fill in the blanks here.

[rvagg]

An interesting possible counterpoint to automation is the renaming of the recently added 0xcert to zeroxcert which would have been a breaking change for js-multicodec had it been in there before the change.

But yeah, the two other commits to base-table.js in js-multicodec this year were by consumers of the library to just add the specific codecs they wanted, not updating the whole table. That doesn't seem like an ideal pattern. I guess a +1 to a regular or semi-regular basis to open PRs against the relevant libraries. Probably not auto merging or releasing.