Point users at canonical kubo/client/rpc library

[lidel]

Part of #8959 – based on discussions from IPFS Thing 2022
JS counterpart: #9125

Current state

We have two RPC clients for "GO-IPFS":

• https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs-api (the oldest one)
• https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs-http-client (more modern)

After renaming to Kubo, this state of things is arguably a really really bad user experience:

• Which RPC client should GO developers use to interact with Kubo?
• What is the reason to choose one over another?

Desired state

Ideally, we should have one Kubo client at https://github.com/ipfs/go-kubo-rpc-client

Keeping go- prefix is important because we want consistency across languages,
and Kubo team will maintain go-kubo-rpc-client too.

TODO

• decide if we need to maintain both libraries, or if one of them should be abandoned (or maybe create something totally new)
  • People who may have relevant historical context: @Stebalien @hsanjuan @MichaelMure @magik6k
  • go-ipfs-api supports more things, e.g. MFS.
  • Our CLI/RPC uses https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs-cmds/ – maybe use this directly and generate RPC based on implemented commands, like we generate docs https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-docs/tree/main/tools/http-api-docs ?
  • 👉 DECISION: move go-ipfs-http-client to Kubo repo as kubo/client/rpc, and use it going forward.
• decide how to handle transition to minimize blast radius.
  • 👉DECISION: keep old repos intact, and create a new one, forking go-ipfs-http-client, making it "official" one.
• update docs to mention only the new client
  • docs: clean mentions of go-ipfs-api, go-ipfs-http-api #10176
  • Clean Kubo Client Story and Deprecated Packages ipfs-docs#1731
• archive old clients
  • update their README's and godocs to point at the new go-kubo-rpc-client
  • archive repositories (but don't move them anywhere - we don't want to break existing code that depends on them)
    • Archive this repo and move remaining issues to ipfs/kubo go-ipfs-http-client#184
    • Archive this repo and point users at kubo/client/rpc go-ipfs-api#296
• CI Test To Ensure New Commands Are Added To Official Clients #10178
  • we notes from JS version: Automation to detect new Kubo commands js-kubo-rpc-client#47 – most likely the CI workflow could be reused between JS and GO.

cc @2color @BigLep @Jorropo @ajnavarro

[lidel]

Food for thought:

Our CLI for RPC over HTTP is built with https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs-cmds/

We use this library for generating docs at https://docs.ipfs.tech/reference/kubo/rpc/
(Generator code at https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-docs/tree/main/tools/http-api-docs)

Would be really nice if we leveraged this somehow in HTTP client library.

Ideally, it would depend on Kubo, and generate client for commands based on go-ipfs-cmds annotations present in Kubo sources. Not sure how feasible this is, but someone wants to explore this, we could add more annotations if needed – prior art in #8802.