Re: [GNUnet-developers] A few comments and fixes to the documentation

[Amirouche Boubekki]

On 2018-01-06 09:00, ng0 wrote:
> Amirouche Boubekki transcribed 10K bytes:
> > You must not commit that as is. As it was meant to start a discussion.
>
> If you want to send a patch that can be applied to git,
> remove this from the patch:
>
> address@hidden FIXME: is it clear to the average reader what a man-in-the-middle
> address@hidden attack is?
>
> and I can address the rest in a follow-up patch.
>
> Good additional comments btw, I haven't worked much on the developer 
> chapter.
> I'll try to answer them next week.

> The state of the content of the developer chapter is still mostly the
> import from Drupal, so fixes are more than welcome!

I am not sure I will be able to proof read more of the documentation,
because I started to rewrite the guile bindings.

Actually there is not much in the current gnunet-guile, so it's still
a win to restart from scratch. This is an opportunity to introduce
the use of guile-bytestructures which helps a lot to build structs and
unions.

The new code is less confusion with less macrology and less code in 
general,
it's my code afterall ;)

I already have a sketch of gnunet-downloader which works.

My plan is to create an alternative to gnunet-foo commands using the
guile bindings. What would be a good name of that command, e.g. 
gnunet-guile?

A problem, I have no solution for right now, is testing the bindings.
Unittesting doesn't make sens, since the bindings requires gnunet-arm
and the services to be running. Help will be appreciated in this
regard.

My take away, after hacking 12 hours on the bindings and reading the doc
from my perspective, correct me if I am wrong:

- They are three kinds of programs in gnunet:

  - daemons, I am not sure what they are. Help?

  - service, expose an API over IPC which daemons
    and ui can query. My understanding is that those
    are started via the gnunet-arm, the principal daemon.

  - ui, those are gnunet-gtk, gnunet-download, gnunet-publish, etc.
    Those are client programs of gnunet services.

- As a matter of fact, there is already various example use of the
  API (over IPC) provided by the different services because there
  is command line programs for most if not all the parts of gnunet.

- Everything happens over IPC. Basically, IPC is like REST instead of 
JSON
  it use C structs with unions and instead of HTTP is use (raw) sockets.

- I don't need to write the client library myself. Since communication
  inside gnunet happens over IPC, the client library is already part of
  gnunet.

- That said, to use the provided client libraries, you will need to
  use gnunet scheduler (see gnunet_scheduler_lib.h part of 
libgnunetutil.so)

- Also, you can implement a driver for the scheduler to integrate it
  with another event loop (maybe that's what is done in gnunet-gtk).

- The client API is asynchronous using callbacks.

Also, we need to discuss guix integration at some point, but like I said
earlier I aim for generic bindings of gnunet not something specific to
guix.

~ amz3