[Vortex] Are content-types and transfer-encodings supposed to work?

[Jens Alfke]

On 13 May '08, at 2:29 PM, Francis Brosnan Blazquez wrote:

>> Unfortunately, such issues are now the least of one's problems with
>> interoperability, since Vortex is accidentally using a private
>> mutant
>> protocol that isn't compatible with BEEP...
>
> I would expect nearly everything but, being vortex a mutant BEEP
> protocol implementation?

Since Vortex's messages don't begin with a CRLF, they are not valid  
BEEP messages (parsing the MIME headers will fail.) This makes Vortex  
unable to interoperate with any correct BEEP implementation. And it's  
not possible to work around this, because a correct BEEP  
implementation cannot  reliably parse such a message and tell whether  
it's supposed to have headers or not (it can't tell the difference  
between a message with a content-type, and one that just happens to  
have a payload beginning "Content-Type:...".)

It's as though I had an HTTP library that sent requests like "GETT /  
HTTP/1.1 ..."

The word "mutant" was sensationalist, but I am kind of shocked by  
this, especially since it was apparently already known but not called  
out anywhere. Maybe there aren't too many other BEEP implementations  
or clients to be incompatible with, so I imagine most users are just  
using vortex to talk to vortex, but situations like this aren't going  
to improve the viability of BEEP as a standard.

—Jens
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