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alright here it is, my hit-piece on CARs in atproto, with a big ecosystem survey

I think this is legit to call out! STAR-lite is cool and solves a couple other paper cuts. but I think churning on low-level formats in the protocol spec itself probably isn't worth it? I do think the ecosystem can+should migrate away from older flexible IPLD libs to stricter DASL/atproto libs

pretty similar to the relay comparison that @iame.li did a couple months ago. with a bit of attention/coordination I don't think it will be that big of a lift to nail these down. getting the details nailed down in the IETF text first feels like the right sequencing.

for public atproto this was really part 1 -- i think the streaming story is still bad, and that we need changes to DASL. (it doesn't actually say you're allowed to require a specific block order! it also vaguely hints that duplicate blocks could become disallowed! i worry about "happens to work")

(plus we still need to figure out how stream-ordered cars are even signalled, they still don't work by current draft. (i'm overdue for making the wg mailing list follow-up!)) for both spaces and public atproto it's a little disappointing to land at ~2x size/bandwidth overhead. but,

end of the day CARs are mostly fine, probably. documenting the warts for me is as much about documenting what we accept as it is about pushing for it to change. (and about answering "why" for STAR-lite and justifying its slight network-fracturing effect)

I think the IETF version will be a small v4 bump of the repo format, and folks could look for that in the CAR commit block (eg, by sniffing the first 10 KByte of the CAR). is that enough, or do you think we'd still need an HTTP header or something?