Re: schema format questions

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 09:00:28PM +0100, Peter Marschall wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have two questions about the frmat of schema entries that
> may be a little off topic, but bay also affect perl-ldap:
> 
> * Is ' (single quote) legal inside qdstrings in schema definitions 
>   RFC2252 does not explicitely deny it. It simply gives the
>   following definitions
> 
>       dstring         = 1*utf8
>       qdstring        = whsp "'" dstring "'" whsp
> 
>   without defining utf8 further
>   Since a single quote is a utf8 character, this could mean
>   that single quotes inside qdstrings are really allowed.
>   So
>       DESC 'New Object's FS Rights'
>   might be a legal description.

An interesting question. It would make parsing rather interesting. You are right
that the RFC does not disallow this. Net::LDAP assumed that no sensible person
would do that (like many apps assume no sensible person puts spacing in filenames :)

If you can provide a schema (or subset of one) with this I will see what I can do.

> * Is _ (underscore) a legal character in private extensions to
>   schema elements ?
>    RFC2252 does not explicitely forbid it.
>    It simply says:
>        "Terms which begin with the characters "X-" are reserved
>        for private experiments, and MUST be followed by a
>         <qdstrings>"
>    But no correlation is made between the word term and
>    any formally defined word.
>    So
>       X-NDS_NOT_SCHED_SYNC_IMMEDIATE '1'
>    might be a legal extension.

Yes, I think that is OK. Again an example will be most useful.

> I do not ask this just for fun.
> I find the assumptions made by Net::LDAP::Schema reasonable
> (since the things above make parsing the schema quite hard).

Right. Its not so much that it is hard, but it will be slower.

> But I have a directory server (guess which manufacturer ;-))

I don't need to :)

> that contains those elements in the schema, making the schema
> un-parseable by Net::LDAP::Schema.
> 
> Before I go out and tell them to correct their schema description
> accordng to RFC I would like to get ohers' opinions if such a schema
> conforms to RFC2252.
> 
> Last but not least, I have a very rough patch available that would allow
> to parse such a schema. But I have to polish it  a bitbefore I send it.
> Are you interested ?

Sure. Don't spend too much time polishing it before letting others test it.
Just a correct patch is fine, it can be polished later.

Graham.