[Monotone-devel] Re: monotone.ca can now be used as a server

[Graydon Hoare]

Richard Levitte wrote:

> Aha!  *cracks knuckles*  Soooo, if someone would listen to you saying
> "bug", probably for the umpteenth time, and get the idea of actually
> doing something about it, you wouldn't mind, would you?

Haha, not in the least. I wish I could dedicate a doppelganger of myself 
to spend its waking hours fixing embarrassing things like this in mtn.

> graydon> I really should have started with SPKI.
>
> Hmm...  ok, so reading up on SPKI would be a good idea, just to figure
> out if it's a good option or not...

Well, SPKI is only really right if you have clocks. We want to go 
clockless, so we need a causal notion of time. See:

http://www.venge.net/mtn-wiki/VersionedPolicy/SPKIWontWork

But something *like* it would be nice. "We" (paul and myself, who are 
not presently doing the work, and possibly not including njs who had a 
slightly different view) "decided" (by writing on whiteboards and 
strenuously arguing) to try something *like* one of a few model sketches 
for trust delegation back in the summit, in February. Since then I've 
been spending time on work and non-computer life, and generally ignoring 
the issue. The residue of the discussion is:

http://www.venge.net/mtn-wiki/VersionedPolicy

It's an odd situation. I sort of feel like even if we do a supremely 
awesome thing wrt. PKI and trust, we'll still be overlooked by most 
users for being too slow. Maybe not. I often overestimate the quality of 
our competitors' solutions.

-graydon