Mixed routing?

[skyepn]

From the V2 Prefixes discussion: #1614

@mepholic wrote:

I am in favor of a more explicit TTL, I think it could be useful for a number of different situations. One way I've thought of to implement this is to use the reserved FF prefix to mean, "flood this packet for one hop". I think this could essentially act as a wildcard hop in existing paths.
To "flood" a packet for 3 hops and only 3 hops, one could specify the path FF, FF, FF. A path of 3A, FF, FF could be used to have the packet first go through repeater 3A, and then "flood" for 2 hops. Other iterations of this are feasible, such as FF, AA, BB, CC to have a packet be repeated by all directs first, and then try take a specific path afterwards.

@446564 wrote:

There's [currently] no mixed routing, it's flood or direct.

Is there any reason not to have mixed routing? It seems like it would open up a lot of possibilities for efficient discovery and routing in the future, without relying on guest access to remote repeaters, while also reducing flood traffic.

For instance if I know I want to communicate with someone in the next region and I know the best path to that region but not their specific node, or they're moving around, I could set their path to that region and append FFFF (v2) as many times as desired for max TTL.