On Wed, 21 Dec 1994 Jueneman(_at_)gte(_dot_)com wrote:
But I have a lot of difficultly with your inventing new mechanisms to solve
problems that the old mechanisms were perfectly capable of solving,
It may be good to remember the old adage:
If all you have is a hammer, the whole world's problems start
to look like nails.
(Or something like that :-) ).
X.509 may be able to solve all of the identification problems that
MIME/PEM's alternatives can solve, but X.509 is as ugly as all hell to do
it, and carries with it a lot of baggage which is not currently well
understood within the Internet. You can have your hammer Bob if it suits
your problems best, but my problems are better solved with a screwdriver.
:-)
After giving the MIME/PEM draft a good read yesterday, the only problems I
have with it are syntactic (a few bugs in the BNF which I'll post on at
some later time). I can't see what all the fuss is with the new forms.
I've already written over 1000 lines of BER handling code and haven't
checked the signature on a certificate yet, let alone stored the thing in
a database for lookup purposes. The array which maps object identifiers
to descriptions the user can understand runs to nearly 200 lines.
Compared to that, the code needed for the new identification forms is
trivial.
if it means
that many groups will have to modify or abondon the infrastructure support
tools that are having to be created.
What infrastructure support? The new mechanisms were added in an attempt
to boot-strap the infrastructure support from the current zero we are
sitting at to the point where users have experience with the technology
and then start to build the X.500 infrastructure for us. Until now, we've
been trying to give the users a pre-packaged system with all the
trimmings, but what they want to know is "will this solve my problems now
in a way that I can understand easily?" and "once I understand it, can I
scale it up?".
Cheers,
Rhys.