Re: [ldapext] new version of LDIF

[Yves Dorfsman <yves@zioup.com>]

Ludovic Poitou wrote:
> Yes there are still people on the list and we still discuss about LDAP, 
> extensions and updates to the RFCs.
> Please start the discussion here.

Thanks.

> What would you like to change in the LDIF format ?
>
> I personally would like to see full support for UTF-8 characters in 
> LDIF, and possibly other encodings.

Yes absolutely ! That's exactly what I'd like to modify.

To me, the advantage of LDIF over other formats (say DSML), is that it is 
easy for a human to read, which makes it a really good format for backups 
for example. If something's broken, you can diff the versions, see what's 
wrong and fix it. But, encoding anything other than ASCII into base64 breaks 
that model for any language that uses characters outside the 7 bit SAFE-CHAR.

From my experience with open-ldap and what I have read on the net about the 
other servers, all the LDAP servers will happily import LDIF files with 
"plain UTF-8", but they all follow the RFC when it comes to write LDIF, and 
base 64 encode anything that contains a characters other than SAFE-CHAR.
Same thing for the python-ldap library.

So really, there isn't a lot that needs to be changed, and it shouldn't 
disturb the existing products at all, it will just give them another option 
for writing.

--
Yves.
http://www.sollers.ca/blog

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