Subject: slpv2bis discussion: AttrRqst tag list wildcards?

From: Erik Guttman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 11:28:46 +0200 (MET DST)

This concerns draft-guttman-svrloc-slpv2bis-00.txt, Section 3.2.2.

This supports the elimination of wildcards in tag lists sent
with Attribute request messages:

     This is feature only useful if you have free form attribute 
     tags like 

       (username.joe=Joe Moof),(username.fred=Fred Lung)

     You don't know what the attribute tags are a priori, only
     that they start with a common prefix for a particular 
     purpose (like mapping user names to full names).  This is
     a very arcane thing, and there's no good reason to burden
     SAs and DAs with the feature of being able to process wild
     cards in tag lists (like "username*") just so that this sort
     of namespace can be returned efficiently.

     If you can't add wildcards to the tag lists, you can still
     request that the ENTIRE attribute list be returned.  This
     will include all the attributes, whatever their tags.  

     The point is to not burden the base protocol and all 
     compliant implementations with this optimization which is
     rarely of use.

Erik