[zeromq-dev] Devices and config files

[gonzalo diethelm]

> Binary data is a conundrum.  There's no clean way of representing it
> in JSON, but that also applies to a UNIX-style format.  We could use
> base64 encoding, or byte strings ("bytestring": [ 123, 8, 62, 12]), or
> we could simply mandate "no binary", that subscriptions and identities
> must be plain text strings.

Wouldn't this be a severe limitation? Even to the point of dictating the
need to search for another file format, adding to the lack of comments
for JSON?

Conversely, we could use 0xNN or \uYYY to embed a binary / Unicode
character and have internal routines to convert those into the proper
character.

> Regarding comments, and normalisation of endpoints, what struck me
> yesterday is that what we probably want is an address broker.  Device
> configurations themselves won't change so much once they're working,
> but endpoints will move around, I guess.  It should be quite doable to
> speak to an address broker to translate endpoint names into literal
> values.

I would say you are mixing concerns here. A broker would certainly be
nice, but that is just a distribution mechanism. I intend to do exactly
the same by having the config file accessible from a public volume (or I
could even use SQLite). This still means I should have a way to state in
a single place what my endpoints resolve to.

-- 
Gonzalo Diethelm