Samba author Andrew Tridgell has revealed he believes rproxy can be revived as part of the OLPC project.

“I’ve got a number of things I want do with the XO laptop. One of them that I’ve been discussing is rproxy, which is something that I’ve presented at the very first Linux conference held here in Australia,” he said.

Tridgell said rproxy would benefit children in developing countries where bandwidth is very low.

“rproxy is an application of rsync to Web proxying to make it much more efficient to download dynamically changing Web sites. It should be ideal in third world countries or any place where you’ve got really low bandwidth,” he said.

Tridgell admitted his involvement in the OLPC project had been restricted due to his lack of knowledge of Python, but said he will nevertheless be able to commence work on rproxy right away.

“That’s an area I can work on immediately, without having to learn Python which, of course, is very attractive to me,” he said.

Tridgell said the reason rproxy withered was because high-speed Internet access is now more common, which means that saving bandwidth is no longer an issue.