RE: appropriateness of combination of controls (new suggestion)

[Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no>]

Kurt D. Zeilenga writes:
> At 09:36 PM 5/10/2004, Ramsay, Ron wrote:
>> 1. I think "appropriate to the operation" is pretty clear.
>> To imply appropriate the the operation as modified by controls, you
>> would have to say just that?

Actually, it's "the operation as modified by the controls picked by the
server (from the controls in the LDAPMessage)".  That does look rather
different from the two interpretations of rfc2251 which seem most
obvious to me: the LDAPMessage without controls, or the LDAPMessage with
all its controls.  Though I don't mind the change, if it is a change.

>> "Cannot controls and combinations of controls be specified
>> privately?"
>> 
>> What ACTUALLY does "specified" mean here?
> 
> Dictionary definition:
>   clearly and explicitly stated

As I've mentioned several times in this discussion, the point is:
Specified (or previously, defined/documented) by what?  By the control
specs, or also by the implementation (when the control specs say
nothing about the combination)?

> Whether a specification is privately or openly specified is
> not particularly relevant to the question of whether a
> control (or combination of controls) is "recognized and
> appropriate for the operation".

If you mean that an implementation may privately define a control
combination as being appropriate when their control specs say nothing
about the combination, that's good (but see below).  But it is not the
natural way to interpret the wording you offered, so implementors who
want to do this may believe they are not allowed to, and client
implementors may trust servers to obey the "wrong" interpretation.
Why do you keep insisting on ambiguous or even misleading wordings
about this?  I've offered several suggestions of how to clarify.

On the other hand, with this interpretation, any recommendation to
return a failure for bad control combinations effectively disappears.
I thought that was a major point of what prompted this discussion.

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Kurt D. Zeilenga [mailto:Kurt@OpenLDAP.org]

>>> On a personal note, I found the whole discussion of 'defined' very
>>> silly. Behaviour is either 'specified' in the usual places, or it
>>> remains unspecified.  It cannot be 'defined' locally. That simply
>>> makes each server self-documenting, in a way.
>> 
>> I didn't mean to imply the semantics could be locally defined,
>> but that they can be privately defined.  While a private control
>> may be defined in terms of an implementation (e.g., "The semantics
>> of the X control are as implemented in server Y."), but that's
>> quite different from saying the defined locally (e.g., "The
>> semantics of the X control are local to the implementation").

That was not about private controls, but about local - or private -
definitions of control combinations that the control specs leave
undefined.

-- 
Hallvard