[Gzz] Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Starting Point for Collab Tool

[Alatalo Toni]

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Eric Armstrong wrote:

> Your article has me really intrigued. I've only mangaged to
> leaf through it so far, but I've seen enough to know that
> targets the major, critical impediment.

good to hear that it managed to communicate - i hope you don't mind cc'ing
this reply to the actual developers .. this way you'll get better answers
to the questions.

> The next step is to evaluate how well it does so. Have you
> given any thought the mathematical difficulties of the process?
> (Identifiers have to get simply huge!)

one thing about the evaluation: feel free to get a copy from
http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=gzz and see it work!
there are some bleeding edge dependencies especially on the GUI side,
but much less for the storage module.

the project has been using Storm for about 1,5years now, as mentioned in
the article. the p2p networking is under development, but the basics, like
creating the block identifiers (and verifying them) are there and work.

i personally don't know much about it on the mathematical level, so the
other authors should correct me here, but my understanding is that SHA-1
hashes are not awfully difficult to deal with. i need to look more into
it, though, also to analyse the applicability in small devices. related to
p2p networking there are of course several issues, that some of the
authors are researching.

evaluation is definitely one aspect to develope in the article, too, so i
think it's good to have these comments.

> I know Eugene and some others have given this matter some
> thought. Have you sent a copy to Eugene, or to the Yak group?

no, not yet - i guess it would be good to hear reviewer's comments first.

also, this is bad timing for the reason that the project is in quite a
flux right now: we agreed on a set of new names on Friday, the whole is
now split to several modules and there are rewrites going on due to the
change of the structure (from zz to rdf, but that's not related to Storm).

a definite good thing in that reorg is that it will be clearer to use the
modules from outside of the project. so e.g. Storm is a whole of it's own
and can be used independently of the other products of the ex-Gzz project
(Fenfire is the new name, hence it's the Fenfire Storm now). so in a week
or two we should be on firmer ground -- just wanted to reply to you
immediately as a comment to the promising post on the unrev-list.

looking forward to what becomes of this,
~Toni