[Spice-devel] spice.proto vs spice1.proto

[Alon Levy]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:10:56PM -0500, Brian Vetter wrote:
> There's been a lot of work/effort moving the protocol handling, marshalling/demarshalling code, etc to a common submodule. I also saw several references over the last few weeks/month on the tunnel channel and the smartcard channel, in particular on how those modules may be out of date ("bit rot" was one of the comments). I noticed that those two channels are in spice.proto but not in spice1.proto. Looking through the code, the protocol is chosen through a session property so only one version of the protocol is being used during a given session. 

bit rot referred to the tunnel channel, not to the smartcard channel.

spice.proto is the newer protocol, spice1.proto is the older one. Not
the other way around.

This simply means both channels were added after the older protocol was
frozen.

> 
> So is it the idea that Spice1.proto is the newer protocol and more likely to be supported long term and Spice.proto is for backwards compatibility with some servers?

No, other way around.

> Or is it that the protocol is dependent upon the needs of the client and it (or the user) thus chooses which one to use? Combined with the comment that the tunnel channel code was out of date/hadn't kept up makes me think that most of the effort is currently focused on support for spice1.proto.

Both protocols (spice1, the older, and spice, the newer) are used by the
client, which decides on connection time based on the major version the
server claims which protocol to use.

The server only supports a single protocol, the newer one (spice.proto).

Perhaps it should be renamed to spice2.proto to avoid confusion.

> 
> Also, has anyone updated the spice protocol document on spice-space.org or is that considered up to date? 

This is sadly not the case, that documentation is in need of work. There
has been some talk about converting to docbook and some people started
at the task but I don't know what the state of that is.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Brian
> 
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