[DotGNU]NNTP as rsync

[David Nicol]

"Mario D. Santana" wrote:

> What guarantees does jabberd give of a particular message's full and
> successful propagation through the p2p network, i.e. of it's arrival at
> all the nodes? This is basically a 2-phase commit, and though for some
> services it may not be worth the overhead, other services (e.g., auth)
> will probably need a strong guarantee of sane behavior in pathological
> cases like splits.

usenet is very good at propagation between peering machines and even
has strong authentication mechanisims (pgp-signing) to protect 
access to the control channel.

Even though universal connectivity has mostly removed the issue
except in terms of bandwidth use (imagine a comparison of the bandwidth use
of a full news server against a web proxy cache network which would
refer to servers containing posts -- the proxy system only needs to distribute
the titles to the end users, instead of millions of articles nobody reads) 

It is easy to imagine a self-updating system that uses something like
NNTP to distribute patches rather than pounding a central server, at least
for the mirror network if not for the consumer nodes.