Well I think this is a great feature and it's something which people have been requesting for a while now, and which I know was discussed at the PT meeting at the last TorDev. I think this is the sort of feature that just makes transports better for everyone, both transport designers and applications that use transports. Several different options for this sort of signalling have been discussed in the past at the Pluggable Transport Implementers Meetings and it's nice to see a concrete proposal.
We have spent several years building a Pluggable Transport community which includes a diverse group of tool developers that all use Pluggable Transports. Tor is a key member of this group and has participated in all of our meetings and the development of our community process for revision of the Pluggable Transport specification. By following the community process for proposing changes to the PT specification, all stakeholders get a chance to provide feedback on the proposal and we an ensure ease of use for developers in terms of clarity on backwards compatibility and semantic versioning.
I would love to see this proposal submitted through the community specification process for inclusion in the next release of the specification. Simply add a proposal to the proposals/ directory of the specification repository (
https://github.com/Pluggable-Transports/Pluggable-Transports-spec) and issue a pull request. We will then add it to the schedule for review, discussion, and eventual inclusion in a specification release.
Great work, and I look forward to working with you to get this useful functionality for all transports and transport-enabled applications!