I was just reading the Documentation/technical/protocol-common.txt description of the pkt-line format. One detail that is left out is how a receiver of pkt-line encoded data determines if a line is binary data or contains non-binary data. The documentation says:
A non-binary line SHOULD BE terminated by an LF, which if present MUST be included in the total length. Receivers MUST treat pkt-lines with non-binary data the same whether or not they contain the trailing LF (stripping the LF if present, and not complaining when it is missing).
It seems like a pkt-line with binary data could easily end with 0x0a (LF) and a receiver would strip it off even though that is a legitimate byte in the binary stream. I don't think receivers should be trying to determine if the pkt-line is binary or non-binary and never strip off any 0x0a bytes at the end of a pkt-line. The client code that relies on the pkt-line receiver is where the logic should reside that figures out what to do with strings that end with LF. The pkt-line receiver just parses the pkg-line length, reads the correct number of bytes and passes them along for further processing. What am I missing? What should be added to this documentation that gives more detail on when/why/how a pkt-line would be determined to be non-binary and the LF stripping would occur? Cheers! Dave
