[Dxspider-support] Problems with command " dx by "

[Dirk Koopman]

On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 15:11, Ian J Maude wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 14:24, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> 
> > The issue for me is the 'state' information, routing and message (as in
> > mail) handling. Trying to maintain a map of users on nodes has (and
> > continues) to drive me mad. This is the fundamental reason why we cannot
> > happily 'talk' to each other. 
> > 
> So how does a user see if a friend is online?  Is this simply dealt with
> on request by a broadcast of some kind?

I have three choices:-

1) implement a different (reliable) way of maintaining state info.
2) infer state information from passing traffic (such as DX broadcasts).
3) don't maintain any state and if someone wants to talk, just do it and
that is then broadcast everywhere. 

I could implement a 'who has' broadcast to locate users and nodes, it
could even return routing info.

But what is it we actually, really, want to achieve with lists of users
(and nodes)? Why do we actually *need* to know who is out there? Have we
not now got to the stage where needing a huge (and probably inaccurate)
sh/c listing is no longer a sysop requirement?

If you have a system that will (or at least: could) tell you that a talk
(for instance) has been delivered, what more do you need to know?

Not having any user and node state information, provided that everybody
doesn't poll the system the whole time for user info, would reduce the
bandwidth requirement considerably.

Also, if you reduce the information that you send out to just (possibly)
'useful', instead of state information, then I reckon you could just
flood route (with some simple optimisations) everything.

I want to make 'chatting' between interest groups to be the standard way
of communicating. Announces, DX and talk messages just represent
different aspects of 'chatter' where DX is interesting to all, announces
to some and talks just 'chat' groups of two people.

Dirk G1TLH