🚀 go-pugleaf

++
> From: Stuart Friedberg  <stuart>
> Out-of-band (OOB) signalling is a partial solution to two problems:
>   1) Indicating urgent conditions
>   2) Providing synchronization markers on otherwise uniform streams
> 
> What work (even blue-sky papers) has been done to generalize the
> problem and its solution to something more than "bookmarkers" and
> "flags"?
> 
> Let me try to explain and motivate the question at the same time....

All this fancy theory about relating separate datastreams by using
the synchronization codes sounds very nice and abstract (and may
very well generate lots of research and PhD theses etc), but from
an engineering point of view there are two problems.  First is the
problem of random errors.  Out of band signalling makes it easy
and quick to recover synchronization.  Any gain you might get
from making the sync codes more complex might be lost by the
time you waste getting back in sync when you take a hit.  Second is
separation of control from data.  Unless you can predict the volume
and content of your datastream very well, you need a simple and
reliable way of getting priortiy messages through in case of congestion.  

It seems you are trying to take redundancy out of the signalling (and
use the redundant resource some other way).  It is that very redundancy
(and simplicity) that makes the lower layers of the communications
channel reliable.

-Mark Garrett
Bellcore