RFC: Command server protocol

[Levi Bard]

> Could we please use full words for the channels? I think it makes it
> much easier to remember what's going on if we talk about the 'result'
> channel instead of the 'r' channel (and there might be new channels in
> the feature that naturally would start with 'r').

Agree.

> One could even consider sending all responses in a standard format, such
> as RFC 822 email headers:
>
>  Channel: stdout\r\n
>  Length: 1234\r\n
>  \r\n
>  <data: 1234 bytes>
>
> My hope is that this will make it easier to implement clients since
> people can use their favority library for parsing email-like headers.

Xml with well-defined schema?

>> Strings are encoded in the local encoding.
>
> Uhh, that seems like a bad idea since there can be many things that
> cannot be encoded in that encoding. Since we are defining a new
> protocol, I think we should take the chance to specify that all strings
> must be UTF-8 encoded. On the server-side, you will call tolocal on the
> incoming strings to cache the UTF-8 encoding.

Yes please!

For what it's worth, I will be writing a .net client library the
second the standard is finalized.