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Re: syntaxes-09 notes
Kurt D. Zeilenga writes:
>At 12:56 PM 3/6/2005, Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
>>Kurt D. Zeilenga writes:
>>>>>>3.3.11. Facsimile Telephone Number
>>> The E.123 format is best considered a free format. While it
>>> can certainly be argued that a more precise format would be
>>> better, it is not generally within our scope to update X.500
>>> syntaxes (or to introduce new syntaxes).
>>
>> That's fine by me.
>>
>> However, you rejected a complaint that OpenLDAP did not accept
>> "---" as a phone number. Have you changed your mind, or do I
>> misunderstand what you mean by free format?
>
> E.123 a free format for representing a telephone number. I
> argue that it is not a telephone number and, much like dates
> like 31 February 2006, can be rejected by the implementation.
Then [Syntaxes] should at least allow invalid telephone numbers to be
rejected. An in standards context, I'm not sure what "not a valid
telephone number" could mean other than "does not follow E.123".
I would note that we've been stuffing phone numbers from text fields in
other databases into LDAP's telephoneNumber, and while these textual
phone numbers may contain enough info or context to make them clear to a
human, it may not be possible for a computer program to decide what they
mean. E.g. "52813/52828" = +47-228 52813 and +47-228 52828 (+427-228*
belongs to our organization). Or deciding whether something is a phone
number + trailing line number, or an international number where someone
has omitted a '00 or '+' country prefix, or two 5-digit phone numbers.
The data sources have been cleaned up considerably now, but some years
ago too restrictive phone number syntax would have meant we had to omit
a lot of numbers from the directory. Whether such a situation is
LDAPbis' problem or the organization's problem is another matter, of
course.
--
Hallvard