After reading RFC 2849 several times, and lots of googling, my understanding is that:
* there has only been one version of LDIF, version 1, described in RFC 2849, written in 2000 * if anything is not ascii (actually, not in "SAFE-STRING"), it has to be utf-8, *encoded in base64* * openldap for sure, but from what I've read, the IBM and the Oracle LDAP servers as well, are happy to read LDIF files with utf-8 "strings" that are not base64 encoded. * every tool out there complies to the RFC when it comes to writing, and encode strings containing utf-8 into base64 when exporting to LDIF. I can see why those choices were made in 2000, most editors back then did not support utf8, so human readability was probably not an issue. I realise that the original idea behind LDIF was for exchanging information between servers, but I can see a lot of value in humans being able to read and modify those files with a simple editor. Changing the RFC (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2849.txt) from: SAFE-STRING = [SAFE-INIT-CHAR *SAFE-CHAR] to: SAFE-STRING = [SAFE-INIT-CHAR *SAFE-UTF8-CHAR] should be trivial, and as long as we change the version should not create any conflict, as a matter of fact, most LDAP servers today can already import a file with this format. It would be so simple in fact, that I cannot help but think that it has not been done for some very good reasons, but I am unable to find those reasons. Does anybody here have more information abou this ? Is there any reason why we should not move on and create LDIF version 2 ? -- Yves. http://www.sollers.ca/blog/2008/swappiness http://www.sollers.ca/blog/2008/swappiness/.fr _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
