Oskar Sandberg writes:
On Sat, 06 May 2000, Bill Trost wrote:
> Oskar Sandberg writes:
> I think it is fair to allow for zeros at the front of the
> value to be cut off.
>
> What business does a node have making modifications to the ID
> generated by a node?
The UniqueID is a value. It has always been a value.
I don't find the term "value" to be particularly discriminating. I take
it you mean "number."
In any event, as far as the on-the-wire protocol is concerned, all
values, numeric or otherwise, are transmitted as a sequence of ASCII
characters. That the protocol participants may be constrained to
intepret these sequences of characters as a hexidecimal constant or a
Freenet address is a higher-level issue, but the protocol still requires
them to be ASCII strings. If nodes are free to use different ASCII
strings with the same higher-level interpretation (for example, but
omitting leading zeros off of a hexadecimal representation of a number),
that's fine too, I suppose, but it certainly seems to confound the issue
to little obvious benefit.
I guess I am proposing, as a compromise, that nodes should always send
the leading zeros. I'd rather the node didn't change the client's
representation at all, but the middle ground between arbitrary strings
and hexdecimal representations seems to fixed-length hex strings.
> With the changes I'm making now and since we have to change
> the protocol for crypto anyways, I'm going to make all numbers
> hex strings...
>
> Do you mean to say that "Depth" will be hex instead of decimal?
What exactly are the arguments against using hex? It is easier and
faster to convert, and more compact. I didn't see any arguments
against it, which is why I assumed no one would care.
It's a gratuitious change that breaks existing clients without
substantially improving how the software operates (Freenet is largely
bound by network latency, so intra-packet efficiency should have a
negligible effect).
Remember, there are probably about half a dozen Freenet clients
available or being written, and changing a field's interpretation impact
*all* of them.
And you are still wrong about the UniqueID. You may think it should
be a string, but making it so is no less a change of the protocol
then making numerical fields hex rather then decimal.
I'm not sure I agree there. Treating a UniqueID as a string means *not*
interpreting the field; changing numeric fields to hex means changing
one common interpretation for another one.
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