Subject: RE: ;binary migration solution

From: "Ramsay, Ron" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 14:06:47 +1100

With userCertificate, it doesn't matter how you ask for it, there is only
one encoding possible, the raw BER. The presence of ;binary on either
request or response is purely cosmetic.

-----Original Message-----
From: Hallvard B Furuseth [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, 18 November 2002 00:50
To: Jim Sermersheim
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: ;binary migration solution

Jim Sermersheim writes:
> Unless some problem can  be shown, this is what I would prefer.
> 
>>>> Hallvard B Furuseth <[email-masked]> 11/15/02 02:58AM >>>
> How about defining ;binary to do nothing, except that if the client
> requests ;binary on an attribute, it receives it with ;binary (whether
> or not the attribute was added with a ;binary option)?

Well, the second suggestion has one problem, so I don't know if that
should be implemented:

> Also, maybe if an attribute was added with ;binary but the client
> requests the attribute without ;binary, it receives it without ;binary.

If the client asks for userCertificate but wants userCertificate;binary,
it would get the wrong value even if the certificate was added with
;binary.

Are there clients like that?

-- 
Hallvard

---

From: Hallvard B Furuseth <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 12:41:17 +0100

Ramsay, Ron writes:
> one encoding possible, the raw BER.

Yes, that's why I suggestet it should do nothing about encoding.

Though IIRC there were (are?) programs who thought ;binary meant the
value should be wrapped in an extra BER envelope, I don't remember which
type.

> The presence of ;binary on either

However, some clients expect attribute to be named "userCertificate" or
"userCertificate;binary" and does not recognize the other form.

BTW, yet another way would be to just define ;binary as a tagging option
which does nothing.  If the directory is used both by clients that want
"userCertificate;binary" and clients that want "userCertificate", the
maintainer will have to add both forms.

-- 
Hallvard