[Gtk-gnutella-devel] Gtk-gnutella and standards.

[Mike A. <mi...@yu...>]

Okay,
If people aren't on the GDF but are talking about standards I suggest
they join it. th...@gr.... Some worrying things about
setting standards is getting to agree them, and the GDF is very good at
not doing that. So far many different things have been mentioned on
there and come to nothing. So I am going to say some words about some of
the topics recently discussed. I also aim to present a web page with all
the relevent links and discussions on, a work in progress.

FFH: or Full-File-Hash. Basically the 'is this file the same as all
these called the same thing. The suggestion was to include a null in the
query with "##" then another null. This would signal the 'I want a hash'
flag before XML provides a method. (More on XML later). The servents
would then respond with hashes if supported. The digest methods agreed
(in it's loosest sense) were SHA1 and TigerTree as a compound element. A
few options were discussed about partial support though. (Which made me
happy as Python has SHA1 built-in, for my own client model).

QRP: Query Routing Protocol. The method to direct queries to servents
with files shared that share the same elements of name. Quite involved
passing mechanism and 'hashed' word table generation (I can't see what
is wrong with plain text...). It works out very good for freeloaders as
no query strings get sent to them. It also works very well for
specialist interests people as the number of 'porn' and general queries
are reduced. So if I had a hard disk full of Mike Oldfield tracks, I
would not get queries for Porn, DivX, Maddona etc.

Connection Negotiation Handling: Well the first major agreement I can
remember the GDF actioning is the protocol handshake change. Extensions
are being discussed all the time, and no method of negotiation exists
presently. The new protocol is now:
> Gnutella Connect/0.6/r/n
> <RFC822 and Extended Headers>/r/n/r/n
< Gnutella OK/0.6/r/n
< <RFC822 and Extended Headers>/r/n/r/n
The headers have not been agreed as of yet.

Download Queue Mechanism: Been discussed, no article written as yet...
<watch this space>

XML Metadata: The metadata question was raised and discussed. A basic
overall agreement was to use XML, but side discussions about alternative
ways to kill XML via tokenising, compression just for XML etc were
discussed. No single agreement has appeared to my knowledge.

Connection Compression: There was a discussion about compressing the
connections using Zlib. People couldn't agree (as is typical on the GDF)
as to whether that was the best method. (As Zlib is available on most
platforms for free it sort of stands to reason). This was going to be
toggled somehow by the new connection method.

They are the only ones I can think of presently, I will try and get the
links on a single page soon, but in the mean-time the GDF does have an
archive, but not as mbox :(.

Thanks

Mike Albon