[usocket-ticket] #7: Provide :external-format for stream and stream-server type sockets

[usocket]

#7: Provide :external-format for stream and stream-server type sockets
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  ehuelsmann   |       Owner:  default    
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new        
 Priority:  minor        |   Milestone:  release-0.2
Component:  tcp-socket   |     Version:             
 Keywords:               |       Patch:  0          
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
 From one of my posts on the mailing list:

 "On IRC, I had some discussions whether it would be enough to just
 support octet streams, but it looks like not all implementations
 support octet streams. Definitely not all of them support
 :external-format for sockets.

 So, as I mentioned in earlier posts, it might be a good idea to start
 depending on flexi-streams: this gives us portable external-formats as
 well as bivalent streams. The latter is important for many TCP/IP
 protocols: HTTP has a character header, but binary content. Other
 protocols have that too (8BIT smtp).

 So, to stay backward compatible, this is what I'd like to do:

   - If no external-format is given: just return the raw stream returned
 by the implementation (as we do now)

   - If an external-format is specified, create a raw stream with 'octet'
 element-type and wrap the returned stream with a flexi-stream,
 exposing the flexi-stream to the caller."

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.common-lisp.net/usocket/ticket/7>
usocket <http://common-lisp.net/project/usocket>
usocket