In response to your letter received 1 Oct 1993 at 09:51
i hope that the only changes that happened to x.509 in the 93 edition was to
support the errors pointed out by the pem committee. since i am the one that
got those changes in, i hope that is all i did.
we did make nextupdate optional since we believed that some CAs would not
commit to a planned schedule and we did not want to see some convention
develop, e.g., nextupdate equals zero, to indicate there was no scheduled next
update. this should not cause difficulty for pem since it can mandate that its
CAs have a next update policy. it is possible for a policy to mandate that
optional asn.1 elements be provided.
if i have failed in producing the alignment please let me know. my goal was to
satisfy the pem group. even though i don't always agree with the ietf i have
always been willing to work with you.
the 1993 edition is still under the "proforma" ballot of ccitt (now called
itu-t) which will complete in early november. publishing will occur after that.
i am sorry that the cost recovery programs of itu and iso prohibit the on-line
offering of the standards. however, they are easy to order (not easy to pay
for).
in the last iso sc21 meeting i got sc1 to request copyright release on the
asn.1. i was recently told that the request had been submitted by jtc1 (the
overseeing committee) to iso. if they agree we will be able to publish the
asn.1 modules on-line. it is not everything, but it is a start. having an
electronic version of the asn.1 should also remove transcription errors.
i personally don't think that directory is any more difficult to understand
than security but then i have been looking at it for too long (however i have
never described x.400 or distinguished names as user friendly - i call them
human consumable). the 1988 edition is not precise in several areas. this is
because the ccitt schedule mandated publishing a standard before we were
finished with it. i hope the 93 edition is more precise - it is bigger.
however, it definitely not book of the month material and does not contain
tutorial material (some years back there was a ussr ballot comment on osi
session complaining that it had too much explanatory text. the recommendation
was that the standard should tell the programmer what to do - not why). doug
steedman has recently published a good high level description of directory
including a good description of the concept of distinguished name. david
chadwick in the uk soon will have a book on the 93 directory, apparently
sufficiently detailed enough to be used as a college textbook, published this
year.
i hope that we can work together. i wrote a liaison from the international
directory to the internet society identifying the new work and inviting you to
our next international meeting in january. since that liaison had to go back up
through our parent committee (this extra step is only necessary at the startup
of a liaison relationship ), i do not know if it has been received by the
internet society.
hoyt