Cut Stand-Alone Range Patch?

[toomim]

@mitar I'm wondering what the motivations for section 2.2. Stand-Alone Range Patch.

Is there a compelling use-case that you have in mind?

The text of this section says:

"When range patches are transmitted outside of HTTP session, a stand-alone range patch format can be used."

I am a little bit concerned that the HTTP Working Group might consider standards for transmission that occur outside of a HTTP session to be out of their purview. But I imagine that if there's a compelling use-case, they might allow it. But I don't yet understand this motivation myself.

[mitar]

It allows then to always have a patch format to request from the server in braid HTTP (see my comment on resolving the caching issue).

Also, I think we have this nice patch format, why not allowing it also to be transferred over sneakernet, mailing lists, hey, even git could start expressing their patches in this way.

So this is a new general patch format improving on 20+ years old unified patch format.

[mitar]

But yes, a lot of our specs are all around the working groups. Like, synchronizator types is also questionable if it belongs to HTTP working group. So this might require you to submit specs to multiple working groups. It will be a fund IETF meeting for you. :-)

[mitar]

I did improve the language in the spec about this a bit more. What do you think now?

[toomim]

I'm still not sold on it: 606f2f1#commitcomment-35758947

But I'm ok with including it to see what the HTTPWG thinks.