Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-secsh-publickeyfile-08.txt

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

> On the contrary, this document essentially specifies a wire format
> for the interchange of SSH public keys.

That's not what it says it specifies, but it's approximately what it
does specify.  That dissonance is, essentially, what I think needs
fixing.

> As such, it MUST specify details like line termination.  Otherwise it
> is underspecified, and it may not be possible to create interoperable
> implementations.

Yes - if it were a wire format.  But a wire format without a protocol
to transmit it over is an odd thing, and, conceptually, it really does
make sense to specify the format in terms of a stream of lines.

It really needs, it seems to me, to decide whether it is specifying a
stream of lines (in which case line termination should not even be
mentioned, since that is outside the scope of the spec, how lines are
represented in storage being a local matter and how lines are encoded
for transmission being a matter for the transmission protocol in use)
or a stream of octets (in which case it should not call itself a file
format, and definitely does need to specify how lines are encoded into
octet streams).

Personally, I prefer the stream-of-lines model, but it's not my draft.

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