Subject: RE: Refering to X.500 editions

From: "Slone, Skip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 14:00:33 -0400

Kurt & Kathy,

I finally got a definitive answer on this issue, and the answer has two
parts.  First, according to the ITU, X.500 second edition (1993) will
continue to be available in electronic form only. (That is, it will no
longer be available in printed form, but I'm not sure who cares.) The second
part is that it will definitely NOT be maintained -- only the current
edition (4th - 2001) and one previous (3rd - 1997) are still under
maintenance. Said another way, there will be no more defect reports
processed against the second edition.

It is probably worth noting that each specification in the fourth edition
has the following introductory text:

"This fourth edition technically revises and enhances, but does not replace,
the third edition of this Recommendation | International Standard.
Implementations may still claim conformance to the third edition. However,
at some point, the third edition will not be supported (i.e. reported
defects will no longer be resolved). It is recommended that implementations
conform to this fourth edition as soon as possible."

Further, the latest version of the Implementor's Guide (V14) contains the
following text:

"Note:   This version applies to the 2nd (1993|1995), 3rd (1997|1998), and
4th (2000/2001) editions of the ITU-T. X.500-series Recommendations and the
ISO/IEC 9594 International Standards. It includes all approved and draft
corrigenda to the three editions. Readers still using the 1st (1988|1990)
edition are advised to keep version 9 of the Directory Implementor's Guide
as this is the last version that contains corrections to the 1st edition
text. This version will be the last implementor's guide for the 2nd edition.
Readers still using the 2nd edition are advised to keep this document."

If LDAP will continue to reference the second edition, implementors should
make note of those last two sentences.

Hope this helps. If there are any further questions, please let me know.

  -- Skip

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt D. Zeilenga [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 3:35 PM
To: Slone, Skip
Cc: 'Kathy Dally'
Subject: RE: Refering to X.500 editions

At 11:30 AM 4/20/01, Slone, Skip wrote:
>I'm not sure of the answers to these questions.  I will follow up with 
>Hoyt and report back.

The primary issue from my perspective is to ensure that
the referenced material is available.  If both ITU and
ISO where to stop making the 2nd edition available,
I'd be concerned that we'd have a dangling reference.

I'd be interested in hearing what you find out from Hoyt.

---

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 17:40:30 -0700

Skip,

Thanks for the providing this additional information.

I continue to believe the "core" specification should
only reference the 2nd edition.  Referencing multiple
editions leads is quite confusing, especially from
within a single document.  I note that RFC2252 should
have had references to both 2nd and 3rd editions!

The only reason the "core" document refers to 3rd edition
at all is to support the updated certificate schema.  But
has been noted, the LDAP schema descriptions are missing
key matching rules, the encoding is not DER, and likely
need to be updated to 4th edition specifications.

Updating to the 3rd (or later) edition would be quite
problematic due to the introduction of new features which
are not supported in LDAP (such as changes to DNs and
other key elements).

Hence, my suggestion is:

1) remove the X.509 certificate schema elements
   from the "core" specification (and pursuing the
   redesign of this schema in PKIX or individual)

2) reference only the 2nd edition of X.500.

Comments?

Kurt