Re: [GNUnet-developers] Chat System, again

[Nagy Ferenc László]

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 01:22:48PM -0500, Christian Grothoff wrote:
> On Saturday 02 October 2004 12:20, Nagy Ferenc László wrote:
> > (Note that I have deleted the entire original E-mail, mostly beacuse
> > I agree or have no related suggestions.)
> >
> > Can the existing infrastructure be used in a way where channels are the
> > keywords and messages returned like file descriptions in afs? So messages
> > are not pushed, but queried repeatedly.
> 
> Not as such -- you would post a message to the channel and people would see 
> it 
> again and again, how would you 'expire' old messages?

Maybe an expire feature would be useful for afs, too. Forwarding nodes
could drop expired answers (3HASH messages), and successful downloads
could reinsert them with updated expire time.

Another solution is that the key refers to a time interval.

> Also, people not 
> visible to the participants of the channel could easily listen in by just 
> making those queries (you need some kind of re-keying to avoid / limit that 
> problem).

I don't mind if participants get an irrevocable right to read the channel
forever.

> Finally, this would cause some huge amount of traffic since you 
> would have lots of peers constantly polling for new messages, even if nobody 
> sends anything to the channel.

Maybe I can came up with a better idea, where lots of peers constantly
push messages, even if nobody reads the channel. :-)

> And even if a peer was constantly polling and 
> was getting replies, you would have no reliability guarantees (you may still 
> easily miss messages in the channel).  So I don't think this would be a good 
> idea.

I don't want to work out all the protocol details at once. ;-)

nfl