On Cerebro, Telepathy, yokes and whites (was Re: cerebro in sugar)

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
| Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
|> Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote:
|> | 2) Make provision in both sugar and activities so that there is a clear
|> | abstraction from telepathy so that _if_ a better collaboration stack
|> | comes along, telepathy won't be "hardcoded" in sugar. This mainly
|> | involves documenting the existing calls from sugar/activities to
|> | telepathy (and objects returned thereof) and signals provided by
|> telepathy.
|>
|> Telepathy _is_ that abstraction.  It exists specifically so that
|> different
|> underlying collaboration mechanisms can be used interchangeably.  For
|> example, Telepathy can run over not only Jabber but also IRC, MSN, AIM,
|> and other protocols.  It seems perfectly reasonable to add Cerebro to
|> this
|> list.
|
| I thought we were talking about collaboration. MSN, IRC etc are
| basically chat protocols. Cerebro has little to do with such protocols;
| its goal is to provide efficient and scalable presence and data sharing
| in an ad-hoc, mobile environment where even IP addresses are a burden to
| maintain.

AIM, MSN, IRC, and Cerebro are all protocols that provide message
channels, file transfer, and presence info.  Cerebro is different in that
it is designed to run on networks that do not have strong routing
guarantees, but it ultimately provides a very similar set of features.

| I believe such functionality to be central to OLPC and should
| not be used "interchangeably" with anything else as long as you have and
| "msh0" interface ;-)

Cerebro _also_ provides a really cool mesh routing protocol.  As such,
Cerebro (or at least that portion) should ideally run on the network chip,
not the main CPU.  My kingdom for some Free marvell firmware, etc.

- --Ben
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