Hi WG, I had a recent off-list discussion regarding transport mappings. This discussion targeted the quite important point what transport mappings are good for - and wether or not -protocol should contain an UDP transport mapping.
My position is that -protocol should NOT contain any transport mapping and that there should be a short RFC outlining how -protocol is to be mapped on UDP transport. Just as it is done in RFC3080 and 3081 for BEEP. I would like to do this, because this will make crystal-clear that -protocol is transport ignorant. This is the comment I received (poster requested to remain anonymous): > I'm a bit doubtful about doing that > as it would > allow people to do syslog-protocol/tcp, or > syslog-protocol/sctp, etc. In > one sense, I'd prefer to not open that opportunity as various > factions may > start doing things their own way which would not promote > interoperability. > Perhaps one company would choose to implement > syslog-protocol/soap while > another implements syslog-protocol/http. If we do this, I'll probably > insist that syslog-protocol/udp be a REQUIRED implementation > and others > are OPTIONAL. I think this is an very important comment in regard to the overall design. I think it is of advantage to facilitate the creation of other transport mappings, as for example is currently being discussed for SNMP inform messages. I agree that it makes it easy to "abuse" -protocol to create non-standard transport mappings. On the other hand, those doing this would most probably do it anyhow, just not only with their own transport but with their own message format, too. I think even if a vendor goes ahead and creates syslog-protocol/tcp, this is advantagous over him creating just a plain TCP implementation with a different message format. And as a reminder, this is current state of the art, there ARE many syslog/raw tcp implementations in the wild. So the lack of a standard way to do it obviously did not stop the implementation. I think it is an advantage if such non-standard implementations at least abide to the same message format. I would deeply appreciate all feedback from the WG on this important topic. Rainer
