[Python-Dev] Google Wave as a developer communication tool

[Terry Reedy]

Ben Finney wrote:
> Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
> 
>> Ben Finney wrote:
>>> I watched [the Google Wave presentation] too. It appears to be
>>> heavily reliant on *very* fast internet access for participants in a
>>> wave. That's far from universal in the Python community, let alone
>>> the internet at large.
>> Even a slow connection would make participation in PEPs better than
>> today.
> 
> How can you know that? A slow link doesn't punish email or NNTP
> communication the way an interactive web application does. Why would
> Google Wave be any less punitive to low-bandwidth users than existing
> live web applications?

I am not sure of what 'live web application' you have in mind to compare 
to ;-).  A general answer is text stream versus binary blob stream.  A 
wave is more like a souped-up mailing-list or newsgroup thread or wiki 
page than an online game.  You open your wave client and PEPxxx.wave is 
marked as having new content.  At your leisure, you open it (or perhaps 
you have marked it 'download updates in background').  That that takes 
longer with a slow connection is no different than with other text 
streams.  If you type in a comment, even 1200 baud upsteam is fast 
enough. Where do you get 'punitive' in this?

>>> It also appears to be heavily reliant on the wave's existence at a
>>> single point of failure (the hosting server): if that one point
>>> becomes unreliable, all participants are hosed.
>> We have that problem already with the tracker, which does occasionally
>> go down for a bit. And the svn host? (One reason to move to
>> distributed system.)
> 
> Right. These are all reasons for moving toward distributed systems;
> Python has chosen to do so already with its VCS. Why would the choice of
> a new communications technology not take this into consideration?

It should.  The wave protocol includes server-to-server mirroring.  A 
wave can be shared across multiple servers.

>>> Neither of these problems exist with email (or NNTP).
>> But do for an email list, like this one.  Or a wiki.

The second of 'these problems' was 'single point of failure'.
That *can* apply to email and wiki.

> No. None of mailing list, NNTP, or wiki are heavily punitive to
> low-bandwidth links.

I would not expect that to be much more true of a text-only wave.  It is 
binary content (and embeded ad links) that made broadband really 
necessary for web surfing.

Terry Jan Reedy