TUNES Migration Protocol

We must develop some universal protocol to migrate information.

That protocol must work on any media and developed for use on any transfer mode, such as e-mail, floppies, and serial line transfer. These are relatively cheap media, but they are used heterogenously, because there are only inconsistent low-level tools to package and extract information from them.

This will be the T3P: Tunes Package Publishing Protocol:

We may thus define several flavors of the protocol; it will actually include a meta-protocol, allowing to dynamically build protocols fit for various purposes, out of basic bricks and constructors. In this sense, there's a grammar suited for the purpose of building protocols. The BEEP protocol framework is a start towards this.

Because every medium has its own characteristics, the protocol should be modular and open, so that what signature method will be used to identify the message or its author, what error-detection and error-correction sub-protocol will be used, what compressed or depressed data encoding will be used, etc., can be independently varied.

Unlike many other protocols, T3P does not leave data interpretation undefined. (Of course "raw byte" data types would still exist.) Instead, every single object will be typed and/or tagged, and the type system extensible by the transmitted packages themselves, so that multiple extra protocols for specific domains would not need to be layered. Domain-specific uses would then only require preludes that specify the types employed, possibly included as a part of the meta-level requirements.

For sequential/serial channels, a major flavor of the T3P will be the TS3P: Tunes Stream-based Package Publishing Protocol:

Specifications