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Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 20:42:10 -0800
Message-ID: <e282921e0903082142j40a866faue696c935e8141477@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Proposal for digital signatures of documents
From: Chris Anderson <jchris@apache.org>
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
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On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Noah Slater <nslater@apache.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 12:56:04PM +1030, Antony Blakey wrote:
>>
>> On 09/03/2009, at 12:42 PM, Noah Slater wrote:
>>
>>> The choice of mailing list has no bearing on good practice.
>>
>> This is a list to discuss uses of CouchDB, rather than the core or
>> direction of the product, which is dev@. If this were dev@ then the
>> discussion would be in the context of official CouchDB support and/or
>> incorporation. As this is user@, what is an RFC a prerequisite for
>> (apart from your interest)?
>
> I am speaking as a user of CouchDB, not a developer. If the community wants to
> interest me in a canonicalisation of JSON then I want to see that the plan is to
> push this through the IETF as an RFC. Otherwise, what's the point?

As an application developer (not a database developer) I'm a bit of a
loose cannon. As such I'd probably implement a halfway decent JSON
canonicalization strategy (recursive key sort) that works for plain
ascii. I'd get the edge cases wrong and not notice. I think this is
probably the proper way to proceed.

Inevitably, someone would come along and complain about the edge
cases, and I would ignore them. After a while, either someone would
write a freaking patch or I'd get fed up with complaints and ensure
that all non 7bit chars were encoded with their \uXXXX equivalents.

The overall picture here is not getting it right but rather having running code.

-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com