Should POUF-1 allow whitespace for prettified output?

[erickt]

In this conversation on #tuf, I'm in the process of renaming rust-tuf's interchange types to pouf, since that's more aligned with the tuf project. One complication though is that rust-tuf supports a prettified version of pouf-1 with JsonPretty. We use this to generate golden files to make sure code changes don't unintentionally change pregenerated metadata. It's much easier to read pretty json than minified json. However, according to pouf-1, this format uses OLPC's canonical json format, which disallows whitespace.

rust-tuf, and I'm guessing all the other implementations of POUF-1, can work with prettified metadata without issue. Should this be something that's formally supported? Or should implementations like this be treated as a non-standard POUF? If the latter, how should we refer to things like this? Should we avoid using the term POUF with things like this?

[trishankatdatadog]

My vote is yes: POUF-1 should allow whitespace

[mnm678]

As long as the implementations are compatible, they should be able to share a POUF number. We should update POUF-1 accordingly.