In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Zefram writes: >Clive D.W. Feather wrote: >>Firstly, I agree with Steve when he asks "why bother?". You're solving the >>wrong problem. > >Conciseness is useful for network protocols.
On the other hand, one should not forget that the OSI protocols was killed by conciseness to the point of obscurity. And next thing, somebody is going to argue for GZIP encoding of the list, and next thing you know, all programs need to drag libz in to uncompress their leap-second table. The major part of the InterNets success was that you could telnet to pratically all servers, FTP, SMTP, NNTP etc, and you could see what went on without a protocol analyzer with a price-tag of $CALL >the limiting factor: CPU speed and bulk storage sizes have been >increasing faster. An NTPv3 packet is only 48 octets of UDP payload; >if a leap second table is to be disseminated in the same packets then >we really do want to think about the format nybble by nybble. No we don't. We certainly don't want to transmit the leap-second table with every single NTP packet, because, as a result, we would need to examine it every time to see if something changed. Furthermore, you will not getaround a strong signature on the leap-second table, because if anyone can inject a leap-second table on the internet, there is no end to how much fun they could have. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
