Re: [Anima-signaling] Two definite proposals for GRASP protocol change

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

> You are correct. That general pattern is not in the definitive CDDL
> in Section 6 "CDDL Specification of GRASP". I was just looking for a
> way to express the general form of the messages. Would it be better to
> just say it in words at this point, without using pseudo-CDDL?

The (not so pseudo) CDDL is fine.
Actually, the CDDL authors added the ".within" annotation to be able to
combine a statement giving a coarse overall structure formally with the
detailed specification.  (Something that would really solve a number of
problems with the way ABNF is used, by the way.)

>> Editorially, I'm not sure I have said that, but I'm not a big fan of the
>> non-parsable ("fragmentary") pieces of CDDL in the CDDL fragments.
>> They make it a bit harder to extract all the fragments and check
>> automatically whether they are consistent with the overall structure in
>> section 6.  (They also make we want to quibble over the exact
>> fragmentary syntax to be used.)  Instead of
>>
>>      initiator /=   ; defined below
>>      objective /=   ; defined below
>>
>> how about:
>>      ; initiator and objective are defined below
>>
>> (But then, saying four times that initiator and six times that objective
>> is defined below doesn't make a lot of sense either.)
>>
>> All this is more in the sense of food for thought than in the sense of
>> "Houston, we have a problem".
> 
> I certainly don't have a closed mind on that. However, it would be a bit
> annoying for the reader to be told many times "Please refer to section 6
> for the detailed format." Maybe we should see what the WG thinks.

I don't have a problem with fragments in the text -- in fact, the COSE
group just had extensive deliberations about using those and arrived at
a very good consensus for having the in-line fragments.  I just want to
make sure they do parse, so they can be checked automatically against
the collected specification.  (I'm also not a big fan of restating the
obvious, when that really is likely to be obvious to the reader at this
point.)

>> I had to add three lines of code to the relay function to do this.
>> So I now propose to remove the 'initiator' field from the messages where
>> I added it (and add the necessary clarifications about using the source
>> IP address). That will be a straightforward change to the -02D draft
>> that I sent yesterday, so co-authors, please let me know what you think
>> ASAP.

Great!

Grüße, Carsten