Subject: [NNTP] AUTHINFO USER/PASS charset & canonicalization

From: Ken Murchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:34:13 -0400

Russ,

I'm not sure I know what you're recommending at this point.  Should I 
remove all references to UTF-8, calling the username and password 
arguments just "string" or "octet string" and use B-CHAR instead of 
P-CHAR in the formal grammar?

What, if anything, are we saying about canonicalization of username? 
Should I say implementations "MAY" or "SHOULD" use SASLprep?

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp

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From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 13:49:45 -0700

> P-CHAR in the formal grammar?

I think so, yes.

> Should I say implementations "MAY" or "SHOULD" use SASLprep?

We seem to be somewhere between MAY and SHOULD.  I don't understand the
issues well enough to be able to pick one or the other.  Sam and Ted both
seemed to feel that recommending canonicalization was worthwhile.  I'm not
sure exactly how canonicalization interacts with existing servers that
don't do canonicalization.  It seems to me that if we're going to
recommend canonicalization, we should say something about the backward
compatibility issues, since that's the whole point of documenting
AUTHINFO.

At the least, we should move back from saying that these strings are in
UTF-8 and instead just treat them as opaque byte strings, since in
practice at those sites that aren't using strict ASCII now, they're not
necessarily going to be UTF-8 (so saying that doesn't help backward
compatibility).

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 08:01:33 +0100

> necessarily going to be UTF-8 (so saying that doesn't help backward

It sounds like you need an Internationalisation Considerations section like
we did in the base document. No doubt some of the wording could be re-used.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <[email-masked]>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
Internet Expert     | Home:  <[email-masked]>  | Fax:    +44 870 051 9937
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Thus plc            |                            |

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From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 09:32:36 -0700

> It sounds like you need an Internationalisation Considerations section
> like we did in the base document. No doubt some of the wording could be
> re-used.

Well, see, this stuff only affects part of the document, not the whole
thing.  It's specific to the AUTHINFO USER/PASS bits; the rest of the
document does this properly going forward.  Accordingly, I'm not sure that
we want to put this stuff into a separate section at the end, since that
would seem like a more appropriate place for general issues.

It probably doesn't make a huge difference, but it feels right to keep the
various backward compatibility issues with AUTHINFO USER/PASS together in
that same section.

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From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 18:36:31 +0100

Russ Allbery said:
> we want to put this stuff into a separate section at the end,

Okay, an I.C. subsection of this bit. The "steal my wording" bit was the
important part of my message.

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From: Ken Murchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:56:44 -0400

> important part of my message.

Can you direct me to the text (presumably in 12.5) that you're talking 
about?

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     2495 Main St. - Suite 401
716-604-0088 x26      Buffalo, NY 14214
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp

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From: "Clive D.W. Feather" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 19:04:42 +0100

> Can you direct me to the text (presumably in 12.5) that you're talking 

Actually I was thinking of 10.2 or 10.3, but now I look at it I can't see
wording that would be particularly useful.