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Proposal about content-size and hash

Solderpunk solderpunk at posteo.net

Sun Nov 1 14:47:12 GMT 2020

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On Fri Oct 30, 2020 at 11:27 PM CET, Arav K. wrote:

On Fri Oct 30, 2020 at 12:06 PM UTC, Sean Conner wrote:
Ah yes ... this is something I proposed back in August of 2019:
gemini://gemini.conman.org/gRFC/0003
Solderpunk has always rejected it when it comes up, mumbling
"simplicity" and "not HTTP again" under his breath.
It would be a useful optional header that simply requires a few lines of
info in the spec - I don't know what solderpunk is going on about.
Clients (that conform to the MIME parsing guidelines) will ignore it if
they don't recognize it. It's not affecting anything else in the spec.

I've explained in another email why I don't think it's okay to put thisinformation into the MIME type.

The other option is to stick it *after* the MIME type, separated by atab or some other delimiter, and I don't like that idea because as soonas the precedent is set that extra bits of optional information can betacked on after the MIME type and simpler clients can ignore them, itopens the gateway to endless such extensions, and the risk that some ofthem will become so popular and widely implemented that clients whichdon't do so are considered "outdated" or "broken", and these "optional"extensions are now de-facto obligatory spec features.

Yeah, I think we can leave this for now. It was a hypothetical
concern that somebody had. Not necessarily a bad one, but until it's
observed actually creating significant trouble for actual users on
actual clients I think we can just table this issue. If it does come
up as a practical concern, we can resume discussion of some of the
ideas here.
The problem has come up again

I'm behind on my mailing list reading (to put it lightly), so forgive meif I should know this: but has the problem *actually* come up, as inpeople are actually observing real problems in the wild where Geminitransactions are terminated early and the situation isn't immediatelyvery obvious to either the client or the human user? Or has it come upin the sense that more people have noticed it as an abstract possibilityand are just looking for a way to fix it on principle because we're allgeeks here and enjoy designing perfect things?

Cheers,Solderpunk