Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited.
Access and Searching of Internet Directories WG Meeting
Meeting Minutes
Wednesday, December 11, 1530-1730
Reported by: Tim Howes
- Agenda review/changes
The proposed agenda was slashed quite a bit, with some items
punted to the list, in an effort to make room for LDAPv3,
which was anticipated to require a lengthy discussion. Items
dropped were: pgp draft (to the list), domains draft (discussed
already in IDS), cip and ldap discussion (discussed already
in FIND). Items cut down in time were: whois++, rwhois.
- application/directory MIME type drafts
- application/directory framework
Tim reported that a new application/directory framework
draft had been produced which addressed all outstanding
comments received. A brief discussion revealed several
more issues with the draft that people raised.
These issues were:
- Example is wrong in how it does line breaks.
ACTION: Tim to fix this in the draft.
- Using MIME vs. BEGIN: END: sentinals to carry
multiple parts.
ACTION: Discussion to take place on the list.
- Change the "proto" parameter to "context"
ACTION: Tim to change this in the draft.
- Reference to RFC 1123 time/date formats should be
change to reference an I-D describing the ISO 8061
time/date format. Chris Newman volunteered to write
up this draft.
ACTION: Tim to fix references in the draft.
ACTION: Chris to write up the 8061 draft.
- Ned Freed and Kevin Jordan both had comments that
they agreed to send to the authors and/or bring
up on the list.
ACTION: Ned and Kevin and others with issues to bring
them up on the list, and/or to give feedback
directly to the authors.
- vcard profile
Frank Dawson reported that the vcard profile draft had
been revised to address all known problems and issues
raised at the last meeting. One additional issue was
raised at this meeting: the use of MIME media types
for audio and photo types. The group felt this would
be better than devising a new scheme.
ACTION: Frank to revise the draft to reference the
MIME media type registry.
- WHOIS++ drafts
New WHOIS++ drafts have been produced which address
various problems found during implementation of the
drafts. These include:
- Multi-language handling
- Separate INCHARSET and OUTCHARSET parameters.
- New templates for X.509, PGP, etc.
ACTION: Tim to ask the ADs to re-issue these
documents as proposed standard.
- RWhois
Network Solutions is working on a meta-directory service
that will map organization and domain names to directory
services. Version one supports RWhois. The next version
will support more general access from other protocols and
the ability to refer to arbitrary directory services via
URLs.
- LDAP API
Tim and Mark produced a new draft updating RFC 1823,
describing the LDAP API. The updates include preliminary
support for the changes expected in LDAPv3, support for
threading, better data encapsulation, etc.
The group discussed the future of this draft, whether
they wanted it brought within the working group, and
if so, what track should it be put on (standard, informational,
experimental). The group consensus was to bring the
draft into ASID so it would get the careful review it
deserves. The group decided to try to push the draft
along the standards track initially, with informational
as a fall-back.
An issue was raised about draft ownership and perceived
credit, should the draft become an informational RFC.
The concern was that an informational document that was
essentially the product of a single company rather than
the working group, not be presented as the work of the ASID
group. Only if the group has consensus on the draft and
feels it has had sufficient input to it, should the draft
be advertised as a product of the ASID working group.
ACTION: Tim to re-issue the next version of the draft
to the working group.
- LDAPv3
The LDAPv3 discussion began with Mark Wahl summarizing
the outstanding issues with the current drafts. These
issues and others raised during the first part of the
meeting were:
- The relationship between SSL authentication and the
LDAP Bind operation needs cleaning up.
- Compliance - What does it mean to be LDAPv3 compliant?
The current drafts are not clear.
- Normalized matching - Do we really want to make this
optional, as stated in the current draft?
- Paged searching - When can the server discard result
sets from searches? Some discussion that this no longer
matters, since each paged search request now contains
enough information to reconstruct the original search.
- Bind as DN w/out password - The semantics of this
operation need clarifying.
- Mapping onto LDAPv2 - Needs clarifying.
- Mapping onto DAP - Needs clarifying. Should this be
throughout the document, in a separate document, or
in an appendix?
- X.500 93 subentries on search - This is believed to
be covered by doing an explicit search for the proper
object class.
- Relationship of the X.500 93 contexts feature and
the current multi-language support - This needs to
be reexamined and clarified to see if 1) there is
more valuable stuff we can steal from X.500 and 2)
there are small changes we can make to be more
compatible with X.500 93 without increasing complexity.
- Additional SASL mechanisms - Should we define some.
- X.500 97 user requirements - [[can someone explain
the issue here?]]
- Mapping of strong authentication - How does this
map onto DAP? What does it mean?
- General direction of LDAPv3 - Some people feel it
is too complex.
- LDAPv2 revisions - should this be progressed or dropped
in favor of LDAPv3 entirely?
- LDAPv2 coexistence strategy - We need one.
Discussion very shortly centered around two related topics:
The future of the LDAPv2 drafts, and the general feeling
that the current LDAPv3 proposal represents an overly complex
revolutionary rather than evolutionary change to LDAPv2.
Harald emphatically stated that LDAPv2 could not be progressed
past draft standard since it has the following known
fatal deficiencies:
- No referrals
- No internationalization support
- Broken handling of certificates
- Generally insecure password-based authentication
- No extensibility mechanism
There was much discussion about the best approach to take
to fix these deficiencies in LDAPv3. The debate soon
centered around two options, the final form of which are
presented below:
1) Start with the LDAPv2 RFCs and add support for referrals,
i18n, extensibility, and better authentication. Fix
the broken certificate support.
2) Start with the LDAPv3 drafts and do a brutal feature
review and cut with the following criteria: Anything
that's in must solve one of the problems above. Other
features to be added later via the extensibility
mechanism.
A third option that involved bludgeong Harald into letting
the group progress LDAPv2 as is was quickly dismissed,
much to Harald's relief.
There was much debate and an initial straw poll showing the
room pretty evenly divided between the two options. After
much "concensizing", the group actually came to a miraculous
concensus view that approach 2) was the way to go, provided
there was a way to ensure that the feature review and cut
would actually happen.
Tim proposed and the group agreed that a small group of
motivated volunteers should be tasked with going off and
doing the feature review and cut, which would then be
brought back to the group. The group agreed that this
task must be completed by January 31, 1997.
ACTION: Tim to organize the feature review and cut posse.
- Any Other Business
The meeting concluded with consensification, almost on time.
The next ASID meeting will be in April in Memphis, TN, USA.
