[9fans] venti workalike in Python

["John E. Barham" <jbarham@jbarham.com>]

I'm attempting to decipher the venti and vac code and write a workalike in
Python.  (packet.c had me bogged down for a while...)  At this point I don't
care that much about compatibility, and can't really test it as I don't have
a running instance of Plan 9.  But as has been noted here before, the venti
procol is relatively trivial--hello, ping, read, write, goodbye, error,
although the two auth messages appear to be unused for the moment?--so
making it compatible at some point shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Having said that, is there any documentation on the venti protocol apart
from the source?

I'm not planning on re-implementing venti's arena code but thought that it
would be quick and easy for testing purposes to implement the back-end
storage using something like dbm or, mea culpa, a relational database.  (I
added binary type support to the Python extension for SQLite with this in
mind.)  Thoughts?

    John