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Re: Empty IA5String

At 11:41 AM 11/10/2004, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>Kurt D. Zeilenga writes:
>> I assume what you mean here is that you are increasing
>> believing that LDAPprep should be redesigned to accept
>> as input an zero-length string and output a zero-length
>> string for this input.
>> 
>> This would require a major redesign of the algorithm.
>
>Why?  Just put the zero-length shortcut you gave at the top of
>stringprep algorithm instead of in the matching rule(s) which uses it:

Even if we presume that the proper LDAPprep("") output is "",
specifying this in the I-D would require significant revision
of the text.  And, if we presume that LDAPprep("") output for
some character string matching rules is not "", the I-D would
require significant redesign.

In short, LDAPprep was designed for X.520-based matching rules.
It wasn't designed to handle empty inputs and redesigning it
to handle such inputs is, IMO, non-trivial.

However, before we consider any change to LDAPprep, we first
must reach consensus the semantics of empty values in IA5
Strings.  I note as well that I intend to argue that IA5
Strings, as specified in RFC 1274, were intended to be
non-empty and expected in many to be non-empty and that by
allowing non-empty values in IA5 string will lead to far
more problems than it will resolve.

Kurt