Re: [Nbd] Back to the options parsing debate
An ASCII protocol, eg line-oriented like http is more easily extensible.
Sent from my HTC
----- Reply message -----
From: "Goswin von Brederlow" <goswin-v-b@...186...>
To: "Alex Bligh" <alex@...872...>
Cc: <nbd-general@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Nbd] Back to the options parsing debate
Date: Sun, Jul 31, 2011 19:34
Alex Bligh <alex@...872...> writes:
> It occurred to me that we are reinventing the wheel with this a bit. Parsing
> options and lengths and so forth is error-prone, and is likely to result in
> interoperability difficulties.
>
> Extensible languages for describing options already exist. For a local
> hack here, I thought about passing the disk name an XML blob - this
> would allow me to pass the disk name and all sorts of other options
> right from the client without any new client-side coding. It then
> occurred to me that if the client passed what it wanted in an XML
> blob (including the disk name), perhaps with the server sending some
> XML at some stage too, perhaps this would be an easy way out of
> the extensibility issue.
>
> libxml is pretty easy to use, and as the xml goes through only at
> mount time, it's hardly speed critical.
>
> Just a thought.
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 153K Apr 24 15:18 /usr/lib/libxml++-2.6.so.2.0.7
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15K May 9 20:30 /sbin/nbd-client*
Strike 1.
XML is basically nothing more than a tokenizer. You then still need to
define a grammar to make sense out of the data contained in the xml.
So all you did so far is add an obscuring encoding.
Strike 2.
Last the options would be a back and forth with queries and replies. A
negotiation of capabilities and so on. XML does nothing for this.
Strike 3. You're out.
MfG
Goswin
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