At 01:01 PM 8/13/2003, Graham Barr wrote: >On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 20:50, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote: > >> I don't think the LDAP API should do any trancoding, the API should >> be a simple conduit between the application and the wire. Any >> transcoding desires should be done by the application (by directly >> calling APIs specifically designed to do transcoding). > >I have been following this thread a bit. And while I would agree that >the API (Net::LDAP in this case) should not do transcoding, I don't see >any reason why it cannot provide hooks to make the application >developers life easier.
My point is that the application needs to be complete control of transcoding as only its knows what needs to be transcoded, but I note that providing enough context for the application to make the right decision can be tricky. Of course you can limit the callbacks to a few basic cases (such as attribute values associated with attribute descriptions), but more complete solutions get ugly pretty fast. I doubt you'll want to cover the needs of an EBCDIC application... (I normally would have said this in jest, but I have a patch before me right now to provide EBCDIC capabilities to -lldap.) Kurt
