[tahoe-dev] switching from introducers to gossip?

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

Brian has been posting patches that move away from using introducers
at all in favor of "gossip". Now if I understand correctly, gossip is
simply "every node is an introducer (in addition to whatever other
jobs it does)".

I have some questions about it, which I posted to this ticket, but
which I think are wide-ranging across many tickets and so better
discussed on the mailing list than in tickets:

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1765#comment:5

Hrm. This idea of gossip conflicts with my idea that each server
should attempt to connect to all clients -- and only to clients -- and
that each client should attempt to connect to all servers -- and only
to servers (#344, #1086).

It would also interact somewhat poorly with #444

In fact, why do we need to switch from introducers to gossip at all?
Could we finish the rest of the #466 new-introduction-protocol and
related accounting infrastructure while leaving the current
centralized introducer (or the #68 multiple introducers) alone?

Regards,

Zooko