Re: [PATCH-3] Allowing extended characters in LDAP authentication...

[Brad Nicholes <BN...@novell.com>]

   This patch eliminates the hardcoded charset table.  Instead it reads the charset table from a conf file.  The directive AuthLDAPCharsetConfig allows the admin to specify the charset conf file.  Is there also a need to specify additional conversions directly in the httpd.conf file through a different directive?  It seems that the charset conf file would be sufficient.  If there are multiple charsets per language, these can be set by specifying the 5 character language ID rather than the 2 character ID similar to the example in the charset.conv file for chinese.

Brad Nicholes
Senior Software Engineer
Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net business solutions
http://www.novell.com 

>>> nd@perlig.de Tuesday, December 10, 2002 1:38:48 PM >>>
* Brad Nicholes wrote:

> Second cut at allowing extended characters.  The name of the directive
> changed to "AuthLDAPCharsetConversion" rather than
> "AuthLDAPConvertFromLanguage" since it is mainly dealing with character
> sets rather than languages.  It also changed from an AP_INIT_TAKE1 to and
> AP_INIT_TAKE12 to allow for an optional "to" character set rather than
> assuming "utf8".  If no "to" character set is given then it will default to
> "utf8".  Also the output buffer for the conversion to UTF8 is larger.

Sorry Brad, I really understand the main problem, but again: the hardcoded 
language/charset assignments are bad. There should be the possibility for 
the admin to assign it by himself. For example, there are several 
possibilities to use a charset for cyrillic characters. The (apache) docs 
use koi8-r and not iso-8859-5, for instance. I think, this could be a 
directive like "LDAPAssignLanguageCharset lang charset" (perhaps not so 
long name) or an external file similar to mod_mime's TypesConfig.

Otherwise my opinion is: mod_auth_ldap is experimental ;-) It's worth to 
try out and see what results and problems are coming further.

nd
-- 
Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else
use it, and get a new one every six months.  -- Clifford Stoll

                                    (found in ssl_engine_pphrase.c)

Re: [PATCH-3] Allowing extended characters in LDAP authentication...

[Astrid Kessler <ke...@kess-net.de>]

>    This patch eliminates the hardcoded charset table.  Instead it
>    reads the charset table from a conf file.  The directive
>    AuthLDAPCharsetConfig allows the admin to specify the charset conf
>    file.  Is there also a need to specify additional conversions
>    directly in the httpd.conf file through a different directive?  It
>    seems that the charset conf file would be sufficient.  If there are
>    multiple charsets per language, these can be set by specifying the
>    5 character language ID rather than the 2 character ID similar to
>    the example in the charset.conv file for chinese. 

As nd said, if someone needs additional conversion, he will scream for it. 
:-)

But something else is going around in my head. Why should this charset 
conversion be limited to ladp? Well, I don't know where we need the 
conversion table too. But the table itself should be general available to 
all modules. Maybe some other modules would like to do the same.
A core (?) directive like LanguageCharsetConfig might be much more useful 
then AuthLDAPCharsetConfig. So the next step would be to move the 
conversion function to core or apr or so, too. Each module, which needs a 
conversion, can call this funtion instead of having its own code.

Maybe there are some overlapping with mod_charset_lite which also does 
charset conversion. 

Kess

Re: [PATCH-3] Allowing extended characters in LDAP authentication...

[André Malo <nd...@perlig.de>]

* Brad Nicholes wrote:

> This patch eliminates the hardcoded charset table.  Instead it reads the
> charset table from a conf file.  The directive AuthLDAPCharsetConfig allows
> the admin to specify the charset conf file.

You should change the command error messages... ;-)

> Is there also a need to
> specify additional conversions directly in the httpd.conf file through a
> different directive?  It seems that the charset conf file would be
> sufficient.

Maybe. I guess, if someone needs it, he will scream :)
AFAICS currently the list is only valid for the whole server (same as 
TypesConfig).

nd
-- 
die (eval q-qq:Just Another Perl Hacker
:-)

# André Malo, <http://www.perlig.de/> #