[Devel] MI protocol enhancement

[Dan Pascu]

I do not know if this thing was already considered for the new management 
interfaces, but I'd like to raise one issue the current FIFO/UNIX socket 
interfaces have.

A command always ends with 2 LF characters, which is good as it allows 
openser to know when one command ends and when the next starts.
However the replies sent by openser do not follow the same guidelines and 
they only have 1 LF character after the last line in the reply. As a 
result if the reply is bigger than the MTU for the transport in 
discussion, the response will not be returned with a single read 
operation. At this point it will be uncertain if there is more to come or 
not. Since the MTU may be unknown, it is very difficult to figure out if 
I should stop reading because I already have all the answer or I need to 
keep reading because there is more.

Now on the FIFO interface this can be worked around, as one can read until 
the reads return nothing (because openser will close the reply fifo after 
it finishes sending). But the same is not true for the UNIX socket 
interface given it is using SOCK_DGRAM and is never closed after a reply 
is sent. But the FIFO interface has its own drawbacks (like the fifo may 
block when being opened if there is none listening on the other end).

To avoid all these issues, I want to propose to change the communication 
protocol to also end a reply with the same 2 LF characters, so it will be 
easy to determine where a reply ends without having to worry about the 
MTU of the transport layer, or the type of interface used (FIFO, UNIX 
socket, ...)

-- 
Dan