Re: authmeth - user & client usage

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

Here are my personal thoughts on this.

It may be useful to distinguish between the user (a human or
application entity) and the client (director user agent).

It would be inappropriate to distinguish components of the client,
in particular which portions are part of APIs shared between
multiple clients and portions specific to the particular client.

Kurt

At 08:54 AM 2001-12-06, Steve Sonntag wrote:

>In reviewing the draft, I was struck by what seems to me to be an
>inconsistancy between the usage of the terms user and client.
>
>The draft defines user as 
>> "user" represents any application which is an LDAP client using 
>>  the directory to retrieve or store information. 
>
>In my mind a client is a client implementation of the LDAP protocol
>(API)
>where a user is an application using an implementation of an LDAP
>client (API) to access an LDAP directory.
>
>If one uses definitions like this, then there is a division of
>responsibility -
>between the client API and the application. Many of the usages of
>client in
>the I-D should really be user.  An example is the discussion of
>bind in section 4.3.3.  
>
>> If the client did not bind before sending a request and receives an 
>> operationsError, it may then send a Bind Request. If this also fails
>
>> or the client chooses not to bind on the existing connection, it 
>> will close the connection, reopen it and begin again by first 
>> sending a PDU with a Bind Request. 
>
>Other usages seem to be the responsibility of the client (API), like
>section 5.1:
>
>> The client MUST NOT send any PDUs on this connection following this 
>>  request until it receives a Start TLS extended response.
>
>I suggest that the terminology be tightened to distinguish between the
>application
>and the implementation of the client protocol.  To me, the term
>application is 
>perhaps clearer in meaning than user.
>
>-Steve
>
>------------------------
>Steve Sonntag
>Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net services software