Re: draft-allocchio-gstn-05.txt concern

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 12:36 PM 5/17/2003, Claudio Allocchio wrote:

>> Well, given your statement that your specification shouldn't be
>> applied to LDAP telephone numbers AND an IESG member commented
>> stating that your I-D defines the "preferred" syntax for telephone
>> numbers in comment to a recent LDAP draft, implies that your
>> I-D is not as clear as it should be.  Like the IESG member, I
>> read your specification as applying to telephone numbers in
>> general (though defining syntax capable of supporting additional
>> dial sequence capabilities).  I think the I-D needs to be clarified
>> here.
>
>If your specification deals with dial string objects, i.e. things which
>are diallable, thus a subset of E.164 and E.123, then the statment by the
>IESG member is correct.

Then I think I'd have to have a long hard chat with the IESG member.
Changing LDAP now, after 10+ years, to use a different syntax would
be a bad thing (i.e., will break existing applications).  Even if
we were to introduce a new syntax intended to offer additional dial
sequence capabilities, it likely should be constructed to be
backwards compatible with the existing LDAP telephone syntaxes.
However, that's a technical discussion for a later date.  I see no
reason to give this specification a "preferred" status in that future
discussion just because its specification happen to carry a
"MUST"/"SHOULD" on future specification.  That would be prejudicial. 

Anyways, I am pretty sure that this paragraph is not true:
   The specification was collected directly from Dial Sequence 
   definitions which are already described in existing
   Standard Track specifications (such as [3] [4] [5] [6])
   and is fully synchronized with them. Full compatibility
   is thus assured, and, as a consequence, this
   specification results in a compendium of existing
   definitions.

That is, I believe this specification is not compatible with
RFC2252-defined telephone number syntaxes.  (RFC2252 is on the
Standards Track.)

Kurt


>If, as it states in the text, deals with E.123
>number, then it is simply not enough, as there are non diallable elements
>in that. However, I suspect that what is called the specification for
>telephone numbers in the LDAP statements is indeed a dial string and NOT a
>telephone number as defined by E.164, thus there is no contradiction in
>both comments you received. The text in the gstn draft is quite clear,
>when it distiguish the two cases.
>
>regards,>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Claudio Allocchio             G   A   R   R          Claudio.Allocchio@garr.it
>                        Project Technical Officer
>tel: +39 040 3758523      Italian Academic and       G=Claudio; S=Allocchio;
>fax: +39 040 3758565        Research Network         P=garr; A=garr; C=it;
>
>           PGP Key: http://www.cert.garr.it/PGP/keys.php3#ca