String attributes feature (project review)

[Nico Williams]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Simo Sorce <simo at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 09:28 -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
>> A few comments:
>>
>> a) the key should be all US-ASCII;
>
> What's the point of limiting it to US-ASCII when UTF-8 is a standard and
> allows proper internationalization ?

These sorts of keys don't need to be internationalized.

Internationalizing lookup keys means handling normalization.  That
seems way too heavyweight for the purpose of this extension.

>> b) the key namespace needs more guidance/definition (e.g.,
>> feature at domainname, a la SSHv2);
>
> I would say that a vendor prefix makes for a better name space (and let
> displaying code to more easily order alphabetically and get all vendor
> related keys together with ease).
> Something like:
>
> mit_otp_name = value
> rh_otp_name = value
> rsa_otp_name = value
> etc...

I don't care what it looks like, as long as we have a naming
convention that helps prevent collisions.

If you want the keys to sort nicely, though, you should want a vendor
*suffix* :)

>> c) should any type information be included for the data part?
>
> type is "string" so far ?

Sure, but the string's form is given by the kind of data being stored
in it.  A type indicator would be completely superfluous, I agree, but
it might help users (think of a URL to documentation of the given
key's value format).

Nico
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