From: Jean-Marc Desperrier (jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 07:41:28 CDT
greg andruk a écrit:
> [...] if only as a reminder that there are ways to do things that
> don't involve breaking backward compatibility with anything.
Are you joking ?
This draft is full of problems and of interoperability nonsense.
> - 100% backward compatible, existing clients and servers can
> simply ignore it.
The other side of it is that the support of the functionnality must be
added from scratch, and this, as I will show, in order to in fact
duplicate an already existing functionnality.
And on the client side, the way it's implemented causes major problems.
> - Charset religious issues are left up to hierarchy maintainers
> and server operators.
Well, the true name of that is :
- NO interoperability. Hierarchy maintainers and server operators
are left free to choose whatever mecanism they want and *nothing* is
done to transmit the choice. Also no client can be sure he has
implemented enough encodings to be sure he will be able to communicate
with the server.
> - It's been working just fine on corporate intranets for years.
And because of inexistant interoperability support, it's the only one
place where it has any change of working.
It has NO support for the user to type the prettyname name of a group.
The client has NO way to know what encoding, what way the prettyname
must be encoded before comparing to the list the server has given.
The user can not use the prettyname of a group that is not carried by
his server, the user can not use a client that will not systematically
retrieve the full list of groups of the server before use.
Then there is NO description of how the prettyname will propagate and
how to make sure everyone uses the same prettyname.
Then as there is no hierarchy, there is NO support for a way to insure
that there will not be prettyname collision and who will be able to
assign what kind of prettyname.
Basically when you get to the end, you realise that this prettyname
thing is a way to reinvent exactly the same functionality as the group
description, with just the _suggestion_ to describe the group in one
word (but if a server carries 30 000 groups, then the prettyname will
have to become the same thing has a group description because no short
name will be explicit enough and avoid collision ) and exactly the same
i18n interoperability problem the group description has today (I regret
that this problem is not taken care by USEFOR, but it's not directly a
USEFOR issue).
There was no need to invent this protocol, the administrators just
needed to fill a short group description for all their private groups,
and to use clients that would display that instead of the group name.