On 12/07/2011 11:03 PM, John Leiseboer wrote:
> With your recommendation below to
follow option 3 would you introduce a requirement for all
occurrences of a repeated attribute to be identical, would
you expect them to be different in some known circumstances
or would you leave that up to the server implementation? My
preference for option 2 is that it side-steps this issue so
I’m interested to hear opinion on it.
My preference would be for the values of the repeated
attributes to be identical. I would prefer to see this as a
“SHOULD” statement in the standard. I don’t think this
should be a “MUST” or “SHALL”.
If it isn't SHALL be the same value then I think the circumstances
under which it can be different and the mechanism whereby the client
can meaningfully determine which is the most recent value would need
to be well defined.
This seems more than a little inconsistent with the argument around
SQL and SNMP stating that it is reasonable to request a value
multiple times.
It would be like SQL statements querying columns multiple times
getting back different values for a column in a single row something
which would be fundamentally wrong (in the SQL context).
I do note your preference for identical but the reluctance to
specify this as the required behaviour is what I think needs
exploration. This is one of the many areas where the behaviour needs
to be well defined for interoperability purposes or will end up with
more clients being produced which simply are unable to talk to a
range of servers except through trial and error to determine the
lowest common denominator of behaviour. Working through that process
will give KMIP a bit of a bad reputation in terms of delivering on
*interoperability* and to me at least that should be what guides the
TC decision making process.
Right now we are at the point where anything other than unspecified
(leading to interoperability issues) will require one or more
vendors to change their shipping products. It is I think one of the
reasons why we didn't reach consensus and why I asked for a ballot
to get a wider group opinion which came back with rather mixed
results reflecting the diverse TC member background.
I see any area in the specification where vendors have taken a
different approach during implementation which impacts
interoperability is an area that needs to be addressed in the
specification.
Tim.
