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* [Bitcoin-development] BIP70/71 issue, RFD
@ 2014-01-26 21:11 Andreas Schildbach
  2014-01-26 21:24 ` Mike Hearn
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread
From: Andreas Schildbach @ 2014-01-26 21:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: bitcoin-development

I'm experimenting with BIP70/71 (payment protocol) usage in face to face
payments (more on that soon).

I've excountered an issue with the protobuf format. Protobufs are not
self-delimiting. That means if you're reading from an undelimited
stream, you will read endlessly because you don't know how much to read.

The current BIP70 implementations probably work because they're reading
either from a file or from an HTTP resource which sets the
Content-Length header. Trouble is the Content-Length header is optional,
and also there are many kinds of streams that don't have this built-in
delimiting mechanism.

The Java protobuf API solves this by offering delimited I/O, like

payment.writeDelimitedTo(os);

This writes the size of the message as a varint before writing the data.
I don't know about protobuf implementations for other languages but I'd
expect them to offer something compatible.

However, this leading varint is an incompatible change and would need to
be added to the spec.

I specifically encountered this with PaymentMessage and PaymentACK, but
it might be a good idea to apply this to all messages if any. Open for
discussion.




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2014-01-27  2:05 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2014-01-26 21:11 [Bitcoin-development] BIP70/71 issue, RFD Andreas Schildbach
2014-01-26 21:24 ` Mike Hearn
2014-01-26 21:32   ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-01-26 22:00     ` Mike Hearn
2014-01-26 22:14       ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-01-26 23:01         ` Mike Hearn
2014-01-27  2:05           ` Gavin

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