Re: UTF-8 full support in LDIF / LDIF v2

Ok, let's split the two issue:

First, is it worth amending the standard to allow non-base64 UTF-8 ?
(forget about multi-line attribute value for a moment).

Looking back (way back) at this thread, I am not the only one seeing value here:


Michael Ströder wrote:
>>> I'm not convinced that removing the ASCII restrictions will be a good
>>>  thing.  Not only do I doubt it will have a net positive on 
>>> displayability of LDIF for those who have a displayability goal (I 
>>> don't this goal), I think it will have a net negative impact on 
>>> interoperability and user confusion, such as when the user creates a 
>>> file using one Unicode normalization algorithm, but is trying to set 
>>> values which require a different Unicode normalization value.
>> How so ? In the current version, you have to encode your Unicode to
>> UTF-8, and then encode it again to base64. With my proposal, you would
>> get the exact same UTF-8 strings as you do today, but they would not be
>> (or would not have to be) encoded in base64.
> 
> I agree with Yves here.


Steven Legg wrote:
>> LDIF is first and foremost an interchange format.  Conversion from LDAP
>> PDU->LDIF Record->LDAP PDU MUST produce as output the input, octet for
>> octet for every "data" component (the DN, every attribute description
>> and associated values, etc.).
> 
> That's highly desirable for directory to directory interchange, but LDIF 
> is also used for composing data from various data sources to put in a 
> directory and to extract data from a directory to put in other data 
> sources. The octet-for-octet preservation usually doesn't apply in these 
> other cases and the need to turn line-based data such as XML documents 
> into base64 encodings is a serious impediment, hence the reason Andrew 
> and I wrote the Internet-draft.


Ludovic Poitou wrote:
>> I went back through the mailing list archive, "charset" came up, but I
 >> can't make sense of who started with it.

 > I probably did.
 > In europe there are lots of directory users and administrators that have
 >  non ascii data they need to transform to LDIF.
 > With simple scripts, turning the data to UTF-8 and then to base64 encoded
 > is a pain. Allowing to specify a charset and then letting the tools doing
 > the conversion to UTF-8 automatically could simplify their life.




Can we try to think of what sort of problem non-encoded UTF-8 would create ?
If there is none, than, could we implement a version 2 that does this ?
The people that don't care for it, can carry on using version 1 ?

-- 
Yves.
http://www.sollers.ca/

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