Re: [GNUnet-developers] Chat System, again

[Christian Grothoff]

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?  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).  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.  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.

C