Re: linux-ipsec: uses of SA specifiers

> I quite like the simplicity of this concept, but am still not crazy on the

It's a concern. I fiddled with alternatives, but couldn't find anything that made me happy. Switching the protocol and SPI around makes it look less like a mail address, but "203ah" looks too much like it might be some funny notation for hex. The one thing that looked vaguely promising was using a different delimiter character instead of @, but I couldn't come up with anything I really liked ("/"? "%"?). I finally decided that confusion with mail wasn't too likely, but I could be wrong...

> > (esp202@10.0.0.2, 3DES-MD5-96 Encryption)
>
> I agree all this is quite elegant. I assume the above is an oversight

Just keeping things simple; I'd have changed it if I'd noticed that.

> I would prefer to keep

Any particular reason? To my mind, when you're dealing with arbitrary numbers which don't subdivide in any interesting way, it's usually simpler to use decimal. The 0x kills any compactness advantage.

I suppose, if there's *no* other context in which we're displaying or entering SPIs, we could use hex and omit the 0x -- the SPI is just a string of gibberish that happens to be hex digits.

(Hmm, for that matter, we could use a larger number base, since in that case the encoding doesn't matter. However, I don't think it really pays off much unless we use both uppercase and lowercase letters, and that seems like potential trouble.)

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry@spsystems.net
                                                     (henry@zoo.toronto.edu)

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