Tahoe-LAFS Networking Layer (named 'foolscap') and libp2p

[daviddias]

These are notes from the discussion with Zooko and Daira

Tahoe-LAFS Networking Layer, named foolscap currently supports TCP connections and there is a work towards making it support connections over Tor.

Tahoe-LAFS peers connect to each other through a Signalling Server that knows every single peer in the network that collects the known addresses from the peers in the network, sharing them with another peer when they need to open a connection.

Peers do remote object invocation to call methods on other peers once the connection is open.

libp2p can be an interesting approach for Tahoe-LAFS to support multiple transports, as this feature is currently built in and ready on the Swarm level. libp2p offers mechanisms for discovery of peers, routing and record storing, however, it was built to 'only use what you need'

To start testing this, we need to get libp2p-swarm implemented in Python. python-libp2p efforts are currently tracked here ipfs-shipyard/py-ipfs#21.

For reference:

• libp2p spec https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/libp2p
• js-libp2p-swarm https://github.com/diasdavid/js-libp2p-swarm
• go-libp2p swarm https://github.com/ipfs/go-libp2p

Also, networking learnings from building foolscap -> https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&component=code-network&order=priority