Subject: LDAP DN format and short names

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 07:51:40 -0500

There are numerous differences between the LDAPv2 and LDAPv3
DN specification.  I discuss some of these differences in the
draft-zeilenga-ldapbis-vd-00.txt.  Anyways, these differences
are quite moot as LDAPv2 should soon be moved to historical
status (once LDAPv3 progresses to Draft Standard status).

RFC 2253 was fairly clear as how to generate a string
representation of an X.500(93) distinguished name.   The most
glaring problem was rather unclear as to which table of short
names it was referring to in Section 2.3.  The RFC 2253 editor
stated that the 2.3 table is the table and not an example of
table.  This makes sense given the objectives of the I-D to
produce an unambiguous string representation.  However, as
many implementations used other tables, LDAPbis determined
it was inappropriate to mandate use of this table and arrived,
after extended discussion but strong consensus, at the text
you now find in draft-ietf-ldapbis-dn-05.txt.

I note that this I-D has just completed an LDAPbis WG Last Call.
We have a couple of clarifying comments to make and an
implementation report to complete, but it's basically ready to
be progressed.  If you have issues which have not been addressed
(see archives), you are encouraged to raise them now on the
LDAPbis mailing list.

Kurt