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