On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:52:22 -0500, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca>  
wrote:

> With MC2, each presence assertion would be versioned separately. Thus  
> you'd only get new versions when some node left or joined the network,  
> and you'd be able to compare it with your current notion of the status  
> of the node: either it's the same version (status hasn't changed), it's  
> an older version (you can discard it), or it's a newer version (you need  
> to update your status)
>
Your are talking about 'older', 'newer'. There are three ways my  
restricted bit of grey mass can come up with:
- Transfer the notion with the information, like MC1 does;
- Globally synchronise time;
- Nodes send their notion of time around and you keep a tab on the last  
time seen per node. Could get expensive.
But then, I've been busy with non-computer stuff the whole day so please  
tell me which obvious method I'm overlooking (and you'd do me a big favor  
if you would apply this to the example *I've* been thinking about, with  
the distributed collections of assertions you want to reconstruct locally  
to a regular collection with some degree of confidence).

(note that 'time' in this context is just anything that will allow  
comparison - 'monotonically increasing counter' might be the appropriate  
CS term, but I neither have a CS degree nor did I have a lot of coffee  
today...)

> I'm liking more and more the idea of doing mc2 network repositories via  
> p2p.
>
My experiments with the current stuff show that, yes - it has quite a  
number of things to like (especially: no server setup, no need to type in  
hostnames etcetera), which IMCUO (that's a Completely Unobjective opinion,  
BTW, FYI) outweighs the disadvantages.