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Sean Conner sean at conman.org
Wed Sep 23 00:54:35 BST 2020
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It was thus said that the Great Simon Heath once stated:
Hi, all. Pardon me if this is a little off-topic, it was suggested I
share this here.
A bit off topic, but I don't mind. I can't answer for others though.
I got annoyed at Matrix's complexity and IRC's
idiosyncracies, and said "I wish there were something like Gemini for
chat protocols". ...
I ended up with something I call Scalar:
https://sr.ht/~icefox/scalar/
It's very WIP still, but there's a minimum viable product specification
and implementation, with much more emphasis on "minimum" than "viable".
Very minimum, and it doesn't even both with DNS SRV records. The use ofCBOR is neat (I think it's underrated personally) but you seem to be havingsecond thoughts about it:
One of the annoying things about CBOR is the variable-length encoding means it's hard to know what the heck you're doing with this until you've actually encoded your message.
I don't understand what you complaining about here. Is it the fact youdon't know how much space to use when encoding? When decoding? How dodecode in a language like Rust of C that make it difficult to deal withdynamic data?
Blob?: Now that I think of it, not sure there's anything terribly wrong with sticking small binary data in a message or such? CBOR can distinguish the two, though it's a bit of a pain. Consider it.
Actually, that's one of the easier things to deal with because TEXT isdistinct from BIN in CBOR.
/// ALSO TODO: It might be nice to use serde's "internally tagged" format, for brevity, but /// that messes up with `cbor_serde`'s packed format, probably because serde's tags want to be /// strings and cb's packed format wants them to be integers. We may just be hitting the /// limits of serde, cbor, or both. Keep thinking about it!
CBOR tags are integers, but they are semantic tags, not name tags. They're there to say "the following string is to be used as a timestamp inRFC-3339 format" or "the following binary string is a positive big integer". I get the feeling you think tags are supposed to be like field names.
However, it's proof that the idea works, and carrying on the design of
the protocol is pretty straightforward. I can't *quite* bring myself to
design something as hardcore minimalist as Gemini,
Gemini is basically HTTP/0.9 with 2 digit status codes. Hardcoreminimalist is Gopher, which doesn't support MIME types, nor status codes. Ahardcore, minimalist chat protocol would be "one server, one 'room'everybody chats in." I've done that in 100 lines of Lua.
but I still hope it
meets Gemini's design criteria. No idea if I will keep working on it
in the immediate future, but maybe it will inspire interesting
discussion.
Perhaps. But as it stands now, there's not enough to even make a"proof-of-concept". Well, maybe, if one just goes ahead to design theprotocol themselves.
Another comment I have is the use of DNS SRV records. It's a great idea(I like it personally) but it makes it just that much harder to use as aprotocol. Setting up a Scalar server also means updating DNS records. Assomeone who runs their own DNS infrastructure [1] it's easy for me to addSRV records. I don't know about that in general (someone else might have tospeak up about that).
Second, using SRV records in a client isn't easy either. There's a(POSIX) standard function getaddrinfo() for returning an A or AAAA record(IP address), but not one for SRV records. I think libc on Linux containsfunctions one could use to get SRV records, but I don't know off the top ofmy head what they might be. I know there are libraries out there that candeal with SRV records, but most are crap [2].
Gemini's only real external requirement is a library for TLS. So far,Scalar requires CBOR and DNS, so it might not be so simple.
-spc
[1] Yes, I do. I even had a hand in setting up my server provider's DNS infrastructure.
[2] I'm biased here. I looked into half a dozen DNS libraries and found them all to be pure crap. That's why I ended up writing my own [3], like I do [4].
[3] https://github.com/spc476/SPCDNS
[4] I even have a CBOR library: https://github.com/spc476/CBOR