Re: Regarding <draft-ietf-ldapext-knowledge-00.txt>

[Christopher Lukas <lukas@cs.wisc.edu>]

David,

After an admittedly cursory reading of the draft and the messages about
it, I'm somewhat confused. As a general comment, I think the draft could
use some clarification like that you've written in some of your messages
about the draft. 

So the general point of the draft is to allow servers in different
namespaces to refer to one another by sending clients referrals, right?

It seems like the draft has some redundancies with the
draft-ietf-ldapext-namedref-00.txt. Don't the referrals with types
"cross" and "subr" function in the same way as referrals defined in
draft-ietf-ldapext-namedref-00.txt?

Also, the "sup" referral is closely related to the other discussion
about the namedref docuemnt for "smart" superior referrals. I don't have
an issue with it, but I think it falls into the "other ways to do smart
superior referrals" that I talked about in that thread.

In fact, isn't this draft really a specification on another way to do
"smart superior referrals"? In one sense, when a server doesn't hold a
naming context, it doesn't really matter whether or not the requested
context is in that server's local-global (by this I mean the global
namespace from the perspective of that server) namespace or not.
Couldn't one simply have one extra type of referral, namely "external"
and let the "normal" referrals take care of subr and cross
functionality?

Also, does the draft indicate that clients will need to process the
various referral types differently? Why?

- Chris
 


------------------------
Christopher E. Lukas
Internet Scout Project 
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu