Re: [dsml] Fwd: What's the Status of DSML version 1 at OASIS?

[Christine Tomlinson <chris.tomlinson@sun.com>]

v1 was deficient as an LDIF replacement in at least the area that it provided
no means to indicate the modification or deletion of an entry in a directory.
This along with the intent to support non-sequential ldif-like applications
via the "mode='parallel'" mark the departure of v2 from v1.

ciao,
Christine

Tom Beauvais wrote:

 Good point. v1 also had a nice way of representing the LDAP schema, which is not in the v2 spec.  Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: rowley@netscape.com [mailto:rowley@netscape.com]
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2002 3:02 PM
To: Karl F. Best
Cc: James Tauber - mValent; Winston Bumpus; dsml@lists.oasis-open.org; jeff
Subject: Re: [dsml] Fwd: What's the Status of DSML version 1 at OASIS?
 

Karl F. Best wrote:

NEBBIDFFILNKGAMPGDFKCEBCIIAA.karl.best@oasis-open.org" type="cite">

James Kobielus is quite correct that giving DSMLv1 any
official OASIS status
would require a separate vote.
The DSML TC should decide whether this is something they
would like to do.

Is v1 a different spec such that it must be approved separately from v2?
Or does v2 supercede v1 so that v1 is now obsolete? DSML v2 is now out
for OASIS member review, and will be voted upon during the month of
April. So I'm wondering if v1 needs to be approved.

The two specifications address different needs.  v1 is a directory data representation format similar to LDIF whereas v2 is a protocol alternative to LDAP.  Although v2 may also "represent" directory data, it does so by intertwining the data with operational directives.  That means that to use a v2 data dump to initialise a new server instance one must use a utility of some kind to transform the protocol elements from their "read" form to their "write" form.  v1 has no such requirement since it has no operational component and hence is arguably more convenient (and also arguably more human readable) than v2 for this kind of use.  In my view v2 does not really supercede v1 since it does not provide an operation agnostic representation of the data, therefore the two specifications are complimentary.
 

-- 
Pete Rowley
Developer
Netscape Directory Server