Terry Reedy <tjreedy@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 would not want to put money against Google technologists giving lower priority to the needs of the majority of internet users without fast connections.
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?
Neither of these problems exist with email (or NNTP).
But do for an email list, like this one. Or a wiki.
No. None of mailing list, NNTP, or wiki are heavily punitive to low-bandwidth links. -- \ “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as | `\ society is free to use the results.” —Richard Stallman | _o__) | Ben Finney