Re: Private email re LDAP and ;binary

[mcs@netscape.com (Mark C Smith)]

Christopher Oliva wrote:

> I don't believe the suggestion was to eliminate ";binary". I won't speak 
> for David but I believe the suggestion is to make the default encoding 
> for Certificate, Certificate List and Certificate Pair the BER encoding. 
> This means that it would not be necessary to use ";binary" but if it 
> were used, everything will work as expected.


Okay.


> I'm glad you mentioned backwards compatibility because this change would 
> enable compatibility with ldapv2 and RFC 2559. When ldapv3 was deployed 
> many systems that were already deployed became broken because of the 
> stringent ";binary" requirement. So in order to truly fix backwards 
> compatibility, the ";binary" rules must be relaxed.


LDAPv2 is dead. Long live LDAPv3. Which is to say, let's not break 
things again.


> This proposed fix would only apply to servers (not clients) and increase 
> interoperability as well as backwards compatibility.


Would the standards advise clients to use ;binary in the 
AttributeDescription or not? If not, then the proposed change does apply 
to clients as well as to servers.

-Mark