[mnet-devel] Replacing EGTP with PB over SSL

[Zooko]

Jim mentioned two motivations for the original invention of EGTP.  One is 
cheaper session setup (EGTP has a nice protocol that takes one message, in 
contrast with SSL's complicated and chatty handshaking), and the other is 
Relay Servers (EGTP is message-based rather than stream-based, so it was nice 
and convenient to define Relay Servers in terms of storing and forwarding 
messages).

In my vision for ent, neither of these will be as important anymore.  

The cheap sessions wouldn't be so important, because nodes in ent will 
maintain long-lived connections with relatively few peers instead of the 
current (Mnet v0.6) short-lived connections with relatively many peers.

On the other hand, there will be a constant flux of new sessions being created 
as a node tries out new potential peers, pings dormant favorites, etc.  It 
would be nice for these to be as cheap as possible so that the cost of session 
creation doesn't inhibit us from trying different techniques.

The Relay Servers will be replaced by "peering with connectable nodes" in ent.

On the other hand, if we want to add a messaging (i.e. "instant messaging") 
service on top of Mnet or ent routing, we will want to start encrypting 
against with messages-not-streams and one-shot-session-creation-not-chatty-
handshaking.

There's a third motivation behind EGTP's design, which is that message-based 
instead of stream-based semantics make it easier to do transactionality, 
retrying, and fail-stop-security.  However, those features are incomplete in 
EGTPv1, are mostly not really needed in Mnet v0.6, will probably be mostly 
not-needed in the next version of Mnet, and twisted.pb probably offers good 
enough facsimiles for the part that we actually do need.

Honestly, my opinion about this is that Myers should use whichever he finds 
most convenient for getting his Chord hackery and his network simulator running.

Maybe after Myers has familiarity with both of the comms protocols, he'll be 
able to recognize which one will serve best for a particular need thereafter.

Regards,

Zooko



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