Subject: [ldapext] new version of LDIF: scope

From: Yves Dorfsman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 14:27:25 -0700

Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>> So really, there isn't a lot that needs to be changed, and it shouldn't
>>  disturb the existing products at all, it will just give them another
>> option for writing.
> 
> In that case I think you're talking of an update to LDIFv1, to align the
> RFC with current practice.  An update most implementations would need to
> do nothing to support.  Is that what you are volunteering to do?  If so,
> a free-for-all with change wishes would be a bit pointless, unless
> someone else gets inspired to do LDIFv2.

.../...

> Of course, which changes to include will still be debatable.  _Some_ 
> implementatinos likely follow the RFC and reject 8-bit data.  Others may

Yes, there probably are some implementations out there that would choke on 8 
bit data. So I should have worded my sentence as "it will not disturb most 
existing products". This change is small but it means that LDIF files will 
not be compatible with the current RFC, so the version number should be changed.

simo wrote:
 >
 > I think another point is also how far you want to go.
 > So far an LDIF file is basically just a dump, a copycat image of a
 > directory, something you can use basically only as loading from zero.
 > But it's usefulness decreases greatly if you want to use4 it on "dirty"
 > directories, as LDIF currently has no understanding of existing objects,
 > conditional modifications and so on.

To be honest, the one problem I personally run into with LDIF on a daily 
basis is that anything that's not in english gets encoded in base64. I can 
see value in the other problems everybody is bringing up, but I have no 
first hand experience with them, and I feel they require longish discussions 
to arrive to a consensus, and then, because of the level of complexity of 
some of those, it would probably require to test them on a few 
implementations before we freeze it in an RFC.

On the other hand, everybody seems to agree that UTF-8 support should be 
integrated properly, this require very little change to the current RFC, it 
will be easy to implement, and, I think, will make the lives of a lot of 
people quite a bit easier. It looks like the perfect low hanging fruit that 
should be dealt with as soon as possible. I am quite surprised it has not 
happened yet.

Why don't we split this in two, we deal with UTF-8 now, and start working on 
the other issue in a separate thread ?

-- 
Yves.
http://www.sollers.ca/blog

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---

From: Michael Ströder <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:05:06 +0100

Yves Dorfsman wrote:
> 
> Why don't we split this in two, we deal with UTF-8 now, and start
> working on the other issue in a separate thread ?

That's what I was thinking => +1

Ciao, Michael.