[Sugar-devel] p2p stream tubes

[Guillaume Desmottes]

Hi guys,

I released telepathy-gabble 0.7.18 yesterday which implements a
long-awaited feature: peer to peer connections in stream tubes!

Basically this means that stream tubes will use a TCP connection (using
SOCKS 5) to transfer their data instead of sending them through the
server with IBB (base64 encoding). If the socks5 connection can't be
established (because peers are on different NAT's for example) then
Gabble will fallback to IBB.
This should drastically improve stream tube performances and reduce
server's band-with consumption.

As all of this is pure Telepathy implementation details, activities
using stream tubes (as Read) doesn't have to change a single line of
their code to benefit of this improvement! Clients just have to upgrade
their Gabble.

Of course, there are probably bugs in the current implementation so it
would be good if Sugar users could start to test it ASAP.
We should observe the following results in these scenario:

- old Gabble <-> new Gabble: continue to use IBB as before.
- new Gabble <-> new Gabble on the same network: use sock5 connections
(the transfer of the shared document in Read should be really faster)
- new Gabble <-> new Gabble on different networks: try to use sock5 and
the fallback to IBB.

This is the first step in our "improve tubes connectivity" plan and lead
the way to new improvements as using a socks5 relay to transfer data if
direct connection is impossible. The ultimate goal is to use jingle to
benefit real NAT penetration (as in audio/video calls).

Please feel free to test this new version and report any problem you
could have.


Regards,


	G.

[1]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/telepathy/2009-January/002734.html


-- 
Guillaume Desmottes <cass at skynet.be>
Jabber <cassidy at jabber.belnet.be>
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