RE: Attribute Name Length Bounds

["Chris Apple" <capple@dsi-consulting.net>]

Are you saying that you believe that SHOULD (rather than MUST)
is the appropriate strength of requirement to use so that
implementers can limit their scope of applicability as they
see fit?

Chris Apple - Principal Architect

DSI Consulting, Inc.

mailto:capple@dsi-consulting.net

http://www.dsi-consulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org
[mailto:owner-ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org] On Behalf Of Kurt D. Zeilenga
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 3:04 PM
To: ietf-ldapbis@OpenLDAP.org
Subject: Re: Attribute Name Length Bounds


I have a few (personal) thoughts on this issue...

>From a protocol point-of-view, interoperability can be said to
be demonstrated if a presented overly-long attribute descriptor is
treated as unrecognized type.  Likewise for attribute options and
other such protocol tokens.  Additionally, no harm (to protocol
peers, security, the Internet) is done by an implementation which
simply treats overly long (by whatever definition) as unrecognized.
Hence, I don't think an RFC 2119 imperative is not warranted here.

This is not to say that an implementation which imposes significant
limits on the length of attribute descriptors, options, and other
such things has not limited its applicability.  It just to say its
not a protocol interoperability issue.   Implementations should be
free to limit their applicability.

There are many issues that a technical specification detailing
how to support "open-ended sets of attributes" likely would
need to address.  I think these issues can be left to a future
document.

Kurt