[tahoe-dev] p2p or client/server? Re: switching from introducers to gossip?

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

On 03/07/12 05:18, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 9:51 PM, Brian <warner at lothar.com> wrote:
>>
> ... snipping out a lot of useful, clear details about the new
> introduction and accounting mechanisms ...
>>
>> I think we can probably accomodate that. I'm optimizing for our two main use cases: friendnet and paid-service.
>>
>> In the friendnet, nearly all nodes are both a client *and* a server.
> 
> This is not true of the grid I'm most familiar with: volunteergrid2.
> In that grid almost every node is either a client or a server --
> almost no nodes act as both. (I think. This is just judging from
> reading the volunteergrid2-l mailing list.)
> 
> Maybe we need two different names, one for the "p2p style" friendnet
> that you describe in your letter (partially quoted below) and the
> other for the "sysadmins offering one another access to their servers"
> friendnet, such as volunteergrid2.
> 
>> The main question is whether nodes which are both clients and servers should have a single key, or two separate keys (I prefer a single key, because it makes reciprocal storage-permission grants easier).
> 
> I don't understand enough to have an opinion on that specific
> question, but in general I think there is a growing tension between
> "p2p style" and "client/server style", and the above smells like
> baking "p2p style" into the introduction protocol.

Actually I think it would have been conceptually simpler for client
nodes never to be servers. Perhaps it's too late to change that, but
if we have to break compatibility in other ways then I think it would
not be an unreasonable restriction to impose.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥

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