On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 11:09:15AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> This still requires the client to be locale-aware. If the string is
> already being input as utf8, no conversion is needed. If the string is
> ISO-8859-1, the client has to know that and perform the proper conversion,
> which is a /different/ conversion than if the input stream is ISO-8559-2,
> etc.
>
> It sounds like a good idea to me, but it's not as simple as just adding an
> option to the krb5.conf and coding up a quick conversion table. :)
It would be easiest to document that utf-8 encoded strings are the most
interoperable and then let the consumers of MIT/Heimdal krb5 libs make
sure that's what they use. As long as there's no signed char issues in
those libs that should suffice...
Yes, it would be nice if the MIT/Heimdal krb5 libs could make any
necessary conversions, but that would add more code that violates the
GeneralString spec even more than now.
Then again, that way all the implementors could end up implementing a
de-facto utf-8 standard interpretation of GeneralString and to hell with
the standard spec -- but a real solution is needed.
Remember, the primary issue with GeneralString lies in how the *clients*
interpret it -- as far as the KDC is concerned GeneralString can indeed
be treated as an opaque octet string comparable only for equality. This
will eventually bring up the issue of what happens if a string can have
multiple valid GeneralString encodings and how one determines the
"canonical" encoding.
Using UTF-8 would avoid that issue, but then, Unicode does not satisfy
the needs of all live languages, so support for multiple encodings, I
imagine, will be needed.
But this stuff should be on the ietf list, probably.
> Steve Langasek
> postmodern programmer
Nico
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