kdenetwork/kit

[Neil Stevens]

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On Wednesday December 25, 2002 04:10, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 December 2002 08:54, Neil Stevens wrote:
> > Oh, just to clarify:  I have no plans to discontinue maintenance of
> > Kit. The only thing that would cause Kit to be discontinued is a
> > discontinuing of the TOC AIM service by AOL.  The only other reason I
> > would want to see Kit removed is if KDE adopts a policy where clients
> > that are tied to a centralized service are prohibited.
>
> There's nothing wrong with centralized services per se. cvs.kde.org is
> centralized too, since only anoncvs has mirrors. What you mean is that
> the service is running proprietary software, which is a vastly different
> thing

No, that's not what I mean.  To understand what I mean, compare AIM with 
mail.  With mail, can change hosts (say from me at my.domain to 
me at new.domain), change servers (from sendmail to something else), or 
change clients (from kmail HEAD to kmail make it cool), but still have a 
way of interacting with everyone you communicated with before.  With AIM 
you can only change clients.  If you use a different host, you're stuck, 
so you can forget about using your own server software!

These systems have something in common, though:  Alice sends a message to 
Bob via one or more intermediary servers.  It is the interoperability of 
those servers that determines the interoperability of the system.  On the 
other hand, CVS operations are a communication between the developer and 
the repository, and the network connection is directly between the 
developer and the repository.  There is no intermediary between every user 
and every repository.

I could write my own TOC server, but it wouldn't help me communicate with 
anyone.  I could write my own CVS server, and anyone could connect to it 
and get my data.  That is the difference.

- -- 
Neil Stevens - neil at qualityassistant.com
"The nearest I can make it out, 'Love your Enemies' means, 'Hate your
Friends'." - Benjamin Franklin
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