Hi Guido again.
it's good to have some more people arround that are interested in development and spend time in new ideas. =)

Not now, to integrate superpeers IMHO we only need:
* a kind of connect handshaking (fallback to V.04 if opponent is old and doesn't understand the new version)
* and especially a flag (e.g. in xping/xpong) saying if a node is servant or superpeer, very importat for host caches connect sheme. That way the hostslist gather more "quality", they provide IPs + saying if peer is servant or superpeer (+ more horizon information when using the full XPONG proposal).

With this small changes the network can still connect as done before (providing very fast startup when using local hostslists together with host caches), including full functionality for old servants which do only understand v0.4.
However it might also important to make best use of superpeers and improve horizons... I like the XPING/SUPERPONG idea. When connecting to an old V0.4 peer we can still use the old PING/PONG sheme, when connecting to a new we could use the new descriptors. I expect that we will need more additions in future. What about chat, swarming, specialized horizon, anti-leeching mechanism, content provider anonymity... I think many new ideas are important for Gnutella's survive.

The old clients wouldn't understand even this new information, so why not encapsulate the new type of data into a new descriptor? With the advantage that the protocoll remains logical and strict. 'HUGE' is about file metadata and hashs (which doesn't mean it coudn't be used freestyle).

Greets, Moak