[art] Request for review of draft-devault-bare-08

[Jiri Vlasak <[e-mail]>]

Dear Members of the Applications and Real-Time Area,

I would like to follow up my aspiration to publish Binary Application
Record Encoding (BARE) Internet-Draft [1]. I will quickly comment on
IETF114 DISPATCH meeting minutes [2] and propose Charter for Working
Group.

Please, note that BARE was discussed before [3][4] and version 08
includes comprehensive feedback from the BARE developers [5]. Also,
please note I consider myself IETF newbie and I would appreciate if you
can help to direct my next steps.

> Dispatch outcome: A possible WG or discussion forum on this problem
> space, as it repeatedly comes up, but not necessarily this proposal -
> needs to be more widely applicable than only one company (possibly
> this is why it has not been standardised thus far, because it is
> company-specific) and have multiple implementors. Therefore: find more
> supporters and then return with this proposal (and possibly others)
> for WG-scoping.

I would like to comment on those two:

> be more widely applicable than only one company

BARE is "more widely applicable than only one company". Moreover, it is
"being applied": along with SourceHut, using BARE for authentication
tokens [6], it is used by bupstash for internal records [7], by soju for
stateless identifiers [8], and in some personal projects [9].

More about "being applicable" -- because BARE consider simplicity of the
implementation as one of its goals, it is simple to implement it in new
programming language. Because BARE is comprehensive in number of types,
but still kept simple and well-defined, it is good base for other
protocol specifications.

I still have no Google-sized company behind, but I found this in the
IETF introduction [10]:

> We try to avoid policy and business questions, as much as possible.

So I believe BARE will be considered from the engineering point of view.
Please, note that "not being applied" may be related to "not being
standardized".

> have multiple implementors

There are 18 implementations from different authors in different
programming languages [11]. I believe that publication will motivate
developers to keep with the latest version of the standard and to
improve the quality of their implementation.

---
Proposal: Charter for BARE Working Group

Binary Application Record Encoding (BARE) [1] is the encoding with
concise messages and a well-defined message schema. It aims for
simplicity of implementation and broad compatibility.

BARE Working Group will summarize possible use-cases and compare BARE to
existing encodings like XDR, CBOR, encoding used in TLS and MLS, or
not-standardized encodings like Avro, Protobufs, Cap'n proto, Thrift, or
FlatBufers.

BARE Working Group is short-lived with the goal to publish BARE.
---

Thank you and have a nice day,
jiri


[1]: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-devault-bare-08.html
[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/minutes-114-dispatch-202207251000/#binary-application-record-encoding-bare-20-min
[3]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/art/p6s0Q3KPaVkBj7Y9xkNSF5XJQcs/
[4]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dispatch/q4EptN2wWDDt1ea2lLqoYI_d79A/
[5]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/?search=BARE
[6]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/core-go/tree/master/item/auth/bearer.go
[7]: https://bupstash.io/doc/man/bupstash-repository.html
[8]: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju/tree/dc58a707/item/msgstore.go#L75
[9]: https://github.com/c-cube/sidekick/blob/70206101f0cfe39cd457f317657679af524a9f4c/src/proof-trace/proof_ser.bare
[10]: https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/get-started/
[11]: https://baremessages.org/