another small time/date issue

[Seth Proctor <Seth.Proctor@Sun.COM>]

As I read the spec currently, there is no rule about whether the current
time, date, and dateTime must remain constant over the course of an
evaluation. If these values are provided in the Request, then clearly
they do remain constant, but if they're coming from some other source
(and the PDP is required to provide these values from some source), then
two PDPs could have different behavior here. I doubt that difference in
behavior is likely to ever cause a problem, but it does leave things
somewhat underspecified.

Would others find it useful to specify either:

 1. The current time/date/dateTime must remain constant over the course
    of an evalution

 2. The current time/date/dateTime, if not specified as an attribute in
    the Request document, must be generated dynamically with each
    reference from a policy

Personally, I'd like to see #1 in the spec, just for clarity, but I'm
willing to be convinced that this isn't important and/or useful. Just
trying to get rid of an (albeit small) ambiguity. Thanks.


seth


ps  For full disclosure, the open source project I maintain currently
has the bahavior from #2, but I've just changed it to have the behavior
for #1, since I think that's clearer.