@msimoni: I'm building an outliner-type UI for items with children and attributes stored in content-addressed storage. I was maki…

I'm building an outliner-type UI for items with children and attributes stored in content-addressed storage. I was making up increasingly complicated data formats to transfer just the data the UI needs from storage... then I realized: What the UI really wants is a _packfile_, containing useful objects from the content-addressed store. E.g. to display an item and its attributes (which are stored in directories inside the object), the storage responds with a packfile containing the objects needed for all attributes. To display the children of an item, the storage again responds with a packfile containing objects needed to display them.