Re: Closing the NAIbis i18n discussion

[Bernard Aboba <aboba@internaut.com>]

> Well, no you are not correct :-( If the realm part is an IDN-unaware
> name slot, then transformations from the username part will
> have to do conversions.

Can you give an example?

internaut.com!bernarda@bt.com -> bernarda@internaut.com should not require
converting internaut.com (straight ASCII), right?

If internaut.com contained an international character set (e.g. UTF-8),
then a conversion should still not be necessary in RADIUS, since DNS
lookups aren't done on the realm portion, right?

> On the other hand, it seems to me that conversions are
> going to be necessary anyway in some circumstance, and
> this choice appears to place the conversion burden on a relatively
> rare function, and in a place where its known for sure that
> you need to do a conversion. So I think we are picking
> the lesser of two evils :-)

I agree that conversions may need to be done in some circumstances. But
since this is not a common case (might even be nonexistent in RADIUS),
there is no need to optimize for it.

> (If we choose UTF-8 for realm part then one might ask
> if the proxies doing routing or policy lookups based on the
> realm part would have to normalize realms before comparisons
> and lookups; its perfectly reasonable that implementations
> or even users send ASCII based versions of international
> domain names.)

The implied requirement is that users send domain names in the same format
that they are included in the RADIUS proxy routing table.  As Alan noted,
this assumption seems to work today.

> But this is just my not-so-educated understanding of
> the situation. Other thoughts?

I'm even less educated than you.  Perhaps we need to bring in an expert to
validate this?

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