IPFS=>Lotus bridge unable to trigger pulling of data from the IPFS network

[ribasushi]

Describe the bug

In current 0.6.2 lotus both initializers of the IPFS blockstore set Api.Offline. A request from one of our collabs is to make this configurable, so that a lotus client node could trigger a pull from the IPFS network if needed.

[polluterofminds]

Adding some additional info to this issue:

The current workaround is to ensure that content is available on the local IPFS node that Lotus communicates with. However, just having the content local is not enough. We ran a test where we used ipfs.refs(CID) to get the content locally on our IPFS node. We confirmed the content was in fact available on that node, then we tried to create a deal with the CID in question. The deal failed with the following:

error traversing node at "2": could not load link "QmXpVJD..."

We decided to test pinning the content to our IPFS node before sending the deal request through to Lotus. We used ipfs.pin.add(CID). And that worked.

It doesn't seem like we should have to pin content before creating a deal, especially when that content is pinned elsewhere on the IPFS network.

[ribasushi]

No longer actionable after #11661