[Verse-dev] Bitmap layer ids

[Thorsten Jordan]

Emil Brink wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Marcus Hoffmann wrote:
> 
> Theoretically, yes. But since it's almost always OK to just assume
> that the top part of the ID space is unused, i.e. that the node
> doesn't actually contain more than 65,000 layers, Eskil's method of
> using ~0, ~1 etc works in practice with the reference server.
> 
> *I* sure agree that this is ugly, and would greatly prefer a
> known-invalid ID, as stated several times.
"assuming" in general is bad for software design. Never assume that 
users won't use a number, they will ;-)

>>I agree with thorsten that its not a big deal to introduce a change
>>command... then it can be simply integrated and these two operations would
>>be separated. This is not about changing the verse system, just improving it
>>for easier use and maybe better performance!
> 
> 
> True. It would, however, add quite a few new commands, and the 8-bit
> command space is a limited resource. Granted, there is still room to
> spare so I guess this is not a very poweful argument.
Well, sounds like the year 2000 problem... 8 bit for a command id?! 
network bandwith isn't THAT limited. But, why not change that with the 
next release? releases aren't binary compatible either, so you can 
safely change the opcode size.

>>We are in an early state of development, so better do such
>>discussions now and solve it then in 1 year...
> It's all relative, I guess. The Verse protocol is roughly five years
> old, although the current implementation ("Verse2") is younger of
> course, and there have been significant changes from the old days.
Well, it may sound a bit hard, but the cases we are discussing currently 
  aren't that special, so if they haven't occoured and discussed in the 
last five years, then verse couldn't have been used very often...

-- 
Greetings, Thorsten