RE: iSCSI: Decimal encoding - why 64 bits ?

[Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@wasabisystems.com>]

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Julian Satran wrote:

> It was never supposed to be removed. Many values are passed around as
> decimal.
> We can't make any progress if we keep hitting the same things
> again-and-again after a decent consensus has been reached.

The question is does the draft reflect the concensus that all the
discussion participants thought they achieved?

At least one other person had the same impression I did about the past
discussion. i.e. we thought we HAD achieved concensus, and yet the draft
does not reflect that discussion.

> And none of you has brought an argument that was not heard and dismissed
> before.

When were these arguements dismissed? While I recall a lot of disagreement
on points, I don't recall a sound dismissal on technical grounds.

> Remember we moved from unlimited length decimal to 64 bit to alleviate
> implementer fears.

Julian, those fears were for something else. Those fears were for how do
you deal with extended-precision math when reading a large number.

These concerns are that decimal encoding of binary strings suffers from
many of the problems that base64 had for numbers - the need to perform
arithmetic to byte-string conversion (i.e. hotns() and htonl() & friends).

Now that the text explicitly states that the string size is in whole
bytes, things aren't as weird as before. But it's still messy. I'll post a
seperate message on this.

Take care,

Bill