Mesh support very likely to miss Sugar 0.84

[Chris Ball]

Hi Peter,

   > (In the last 10 times I'm been powered up I've never seen a
   > mesh network so I'll power down the mesh until the next time I
   > reboot/powerup and will rescan. If I don;t find one then I'll just
   > turn off. Rescan on restart and then turn off. If a mesh is there
   > don't power off and join in".

The problem is that the mesh is entirely composed of people operating
the same way as you; if everyone only powers up the mesh for long enough
to scan temporarily for someone else's broadcast, then no-one ever finds
anyone else.  You need to be sending out and listening for beacons in a
window that's going to overlap with someone else's in order to work out
whether you're in a mesh or not.

If we had a shared time source, you can imagine something along the
lines of "spend the first ten seconds of every minute sending/receiving
mesh beacons, and then stay powered off until the next minute if you
didn't hear anything".

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>