Re: Liberal parsing of schema elements (ITS#1996)

[Kurt@OpenLDAP.org]

I misunderstood the nature of the problem.  The
client library ALLOW flags, if properly enabled,
should be able to parse these non-conformant
values.  If they aren't working, that's a bug.
Patches welcomed.

Of course, clients must (as in MUST, per RFC 2251)
not send non-conformant values to servers.  But
most clients don't re-send values they read from
servers.  If they do, they are responsible for
implementing the "strict in what is sent" part of
this.

Kurt

At 02:53 PM 2002-07-30, michael@stroeder.com wrote:
>Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
>> To prevent garbage out, we prevent garbage in.
>
>I understand that OpenLDAP is a reference implementation of LDAPv3 
>and therefore the main goal is to strictly adhere to the standards.
>
>But many people using it as a base for developing client apps 
>accessing other LDAP servers violating the standard 
>(Netscape/iPlanet DS, Novell eDirectory, Domino/LDAP R5, etc.).
>
>Regarding this specific issue here you already have some constants 
>to allow a more liberal schema element parsing. That's what I 
>suggest to leverage. Off course using these flags makes the 
>application responsible for sanitizing the data / handle tricky 
>situations if necessary.
>
>Note that I do *not* vote here to make the schema parsing on the 
>server-side more liberal. I'm solely talking about client-side 
>parsing in my own apps.
>
>> If someone takes the time to allow garbage in (liberal in
>> what you accept) in a manner which doesn't cause garbage
>> out (strict in what you send), I'm fine with allowing
>> such into the distribution.  Patches welcomed.
>
>Well, this really depends on what you expect the application to 
>send. As I said before IMHO schema-aware applications should not 
>send an OID in any case. OIDs should be treated as opaque index to 
>a local schema registry (except some hard-coded LDAP syntaxes). 
>That's how I'm currently designing it for python-ldap. The 
>attribute type and object class names are what appear in 
>LDAPRequests sent to the LDAP server.
>
>Ciao, Michael.