Subject: [dtn] why does the cbor encoding of an EID in BP doesn't give the scheme

From: Loiseau lucien <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:43:08 +0100

Hi,

I was wondering what was the rational regarding the cbor encoding of
an EID. The specification describes different encoding decision
depending on the EID scheme and also replace the scheme with an iana
number.

since an EID is expected to be an URI by definition, wouldn't it be
simpler to just encode an EID as a cbor_text_string ?

It also creates an additional issue. Say a user input provides an EID
as a string, if the application agent/bundle node doesn't know the
scheme for some reason (it could be a special EID that only make sens
later in the network) it wouldn't be able to pick the iana number and
would not even be able to "blindly" construct the bundle.

If the EID was just a cbor text string, in the example above, a node
that don't know how to process a certain scheme could still create the
bundle and rely on pattern matching or rely on a default route to
process the bundle.

It seems to me that this approach kind of break the "late binding" philosophy.

Best Regards,
Lucien Loiseau