Quote from: davux on July 04, 2011, 08:12:47 PM

It would be nice if you could write notes about what you discover. AFAIK, the protocol is only partially documented and mostly resides in "oral tradition" (if I may say so it's obviously not oral). You could e.g. contribute to the Protocol specification page on the wiki, that still has strong tying between the network protocol and the internal structure of the original implementation (see "variable length strings", data types all over the document, etc.).

I have a couple of goals set:
- Split out the protocol in a pure daemon part (which does the communication and storing of the blocks/transactions) possibly with an optional SQL back-end.
- Have everything PEP-8 and Python 3 compliant.
- Have unit tests with a 100% coverage.
- Be able to have a local "blockexplorer" that does not depend on the c++ client but instead uses the code of the above daemon.
- Create a 'thin' CLI client that interacts with the daemon (in essence this will just hold the private keys and have some UI code).
- The same as above but a GUI client.

For me when coding, the most important part is readability and maintainability, this is also the reason why I am at try number 3 because the other tries, although successfully parsing the tcpdump of an interaction, was not readable enough. So ultimately I want my implementation to be working 'pseudo code'. As I have particular strong feelings on how the Protocol Specification should be written, I think that I am not the appropriate person to contribute to that page.

As the approach I am taking is painstakingly slow, I wouldn't hold my breath, though I do intend to release the source under the new revised BSD license.
And I am sure that when I at least have reached my 4th goal, I can be persuaded to (help) create a RFC with the intention to submit an Internet Draft to the IETF.