Proposal about content-size and hash

[Solderpunk]

On Fri Oct 30, 2020 at 11:27 PM CET, Arav K. wrote:
> On Fri Oct 30, 2020 at 12:06 PM UTC, Sean Conner wrote:
> > Ah yes ... this is something I proposed back in August of 2019:
> >
> > gemini://gemini.conman.org/gRFC/0003
> >
> > Solderpunk has always rejected it when it comes up, mumbling
> > "simplicity" and "not HTTP again" under his breath.
>
> It would be a useful optional header that simply requires a few lines of
> info in the spec - I don't know what solderpunk is going on about.
> Clients (that conform to the MIME parsing guidelines) will ignore it if
> they don't recognize it. It's not affecting anything else in the spec.

I've explained in another email why I don't think it's okay to put this
information into the MIME type.

The other option is to stick it *after* the MIME type, separated by a
tab or some other delimiter, and I don't like that idea because as soon
as the precedent is set that extra bits of optional information can be
tacked on after the MIME type and simpler clients can ignore them, it
opens the gateway to endless such extensions, and the risk that some of
them will become so popular and widely implemented that clients which
don't do so are considered "outdated" or "broken", and these "optional"
extensions are now de-facto obligatory spec features.

> > Yeah, I think we can leave this for now.  It was a hypothetical
> > concern that somebody had.  Not necessarily a bad one, but until it's
> > observed actually creating significant trouble for actual users on
> > actual clients I think we can just table this issue.  If it does come
> > up as a practical concern, we can resume discussion of some of the
> > ideas here.
>
> The problem has come up again

I'm behind on my mailing list reading (to put it lightly), so forgive me
if I should know this: but has the problem *actually* come up, as in
people are actually observing real problems in the wild where Gemini
transactions are terminated early and the situation isn't immediately
very obvious to either the client or the human user?  Or has it come up
in the sense that more people have noticed it as an abstract possibility
and are just looking for a way to fix it on principle because we're all
geeks here and enjoy designing perfect things?

Cheers,
Solderpunk