[zeromq-dev] Comments on ZRE

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:25 PM, Michel Pelletier
<pelletier.michel at gmail.com> wrote:

> The first is that the protocol definitely appears to have two essentially
> independent mechanisms in play.  The beacon-interconnecting dance, and then
> the actual protocol spoken over TCP (whisper, shout, etc.).  They seem so
> cleanly disconnected from one another that it strikes me they could almost
> be two specs, one is a UDP based socket discovery protocol, and the other is
> TCP protocol that rides on top of it.

OK, I'll bite. The reason for making it one document was partly
because the two layers are interdependent, e.g. the Hello command will
allow a connection even if the UDP beacons were lost. I also submitted
it as a single spec to IANA for simplicity.

However, splitting it into two specs does make sense.

> I would propose then an extension to the ZRE beacon format.  The original 22
> byte beacon would still be valid, but another format of a different version
> would continue with: an octet describing the transport, and octet describing
> the service socket type, and 4 octets that contain the connect-back address,
> or something like that.

That works for me. You can start a new spec for the beacon protocol,
or I'll do it.

I'm wondering whether it's time to move our RFCs into github and work
on them using C4 and pull requests. Any thoughts on that? I can
probably get that working without changing the appearance (it'll still
look like a wiki, but would pull in content from a git repo).

-Pieter