RE: Attribute Name Length Bounds

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

At 08:29 PM 6/17/2003, Howard Chu wrote:
>> The point is that the possibility of interpreting
>> the specs in this way already set us up for deployment
>> issues related to several published schema with attribute
>> names on the longer side of what might have been considered
>> typical a few years ago.
>
>If the server rejects overly-long names with an error message, fine, but your
>message implied that it silently ignored the characters comprising the excess
>length in the name. If it seems that the spec is ambiguous about the
>significance of characters in a short name, perhaps it would be sufficient to
>state in the the spec "all of the characters in an attribute name are
>significant.

One could argue that the TS should be clarified to say:
  All bits of very octet of the PDU are significant unless stated otherwise.

However, I think basically already says this already in X.680/X.690.  But,
I don't see much harm in restating this in [Protocol] (even though I think
it a bit redundant and quite obvious).

I, however, think we should avoid per field statements (except for the
otherwise cases).

>If an attribute name is presented that exceeds a server's
>implementation limits, the server MUST fail the request with an error code."

That would be, in general, a bad thing.  Servers should treat attribute type
names they don't recognize as unrecognized attribute types and many of these
cases don't result in an error being returned.

Kurt