Subject: [ldapext] Re: draft-boreham-numsubordinates-01.txt

From: "Jim Sermersheim" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 18:21:33 -0700

>>> "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]> 10/27/03 11:27:23 AM >>>
>David, Steve:
>
>Technical comments:
>The document is not clear as to whether it is describing the
>well established semantics of an existing attribute or is
>attempting to introduce an attribute with possibly new
>semantics. That is, are you just documenting what is or are you
>engineering what will be? I'll defer making most of my
>comments until you clarify your objectives to the list,
>as they hinge on whether your engineering a new attribute
>type or documenting the well established semantics of an
>existing attribute type.

As I (hope to) understand it, the document is defining an attribute
that has a specific purpose. It happens that the attribute is currently
being used by one or more vendors, but it may be used in different ways
due to the lack of this Internet-Draft being progressed. My hope is that
the Internet-Draft's purpose is primarily to define this attribute in a
way that leads it to be used interoperably, regardless of whether that
will cause existing applications to change.
 
In addition, if there are sufficient changes to the specification of
the attribute, a new OID (and possibly short name) may be warranted so
the existing applications won't automatically be broken (this makes a
good case for defering OID assignment to RFC publication).  Maybe this
is is near the point at which you were driving.
 
Jim