Subject: Re: Last Call: 'TLS User Mapping Extension' to Proposed Standard

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2006 14:25:38 -0400

On Thursday, March 30, 2006 06:00:36 PM +0200 Simon Josefsson 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-santesson-tls-ume-04.txt says:
>
>    This document does not specify how the server stores the
>    user_principal_name, or how exactly it might be used to locate a
>    certificate.  For instance, it might be appropriate to do a case-
>    insensitive lookup.  It is RECOMMENDED that the server processes the
>    user_principal_name with a stringprep profile [N7] appropriate for
>    the identity in question, such as Nameprep [N8] for the portion
>    domain portion of UPN, SASLprep [N9] for the user portion of the UPN
>    and stringprep appendix B.3 [N7] as mapping table for case folding.
>
> Given that the first and second sentence make it clear that the use of
> StringPrep is not required, I suggest using MAY instead of RECOMMENDED
> in the third sentence.  RECOMMENDED is the same as SHOULD according to
> RFC 2119, and is a fairly strong recommendation.  Its use seem
> misplaced here.

Right.  RECOMMENDED does not mean "we think this is a good idea".  It means 
something more like "you have to do this or have a good reason not to".

> It may be better to avoid RFC 2119 language completely here, because
> the entire paragraph is merely an example of what you can do.

Agree.  RFC2119 language has no place in a "for instance".

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