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

[Ricardo Carrano]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
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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.
>

A swiss army knife is never as simple as a knife. When what you need
is a knife, trying to find the proper thing to pull out your swiss
army knife may cost your life. We've made a mistake if we decided that
an all encompassing framework is what we needed in an XO. That's in
the past and certainly there was a good reason by the time. The real
question is: can we fix this mistake now?


> | 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.

Really? Could you develop?

Cheers
Ricardo Carrano