Happenings at the recent OIW Directory SIG meeting.

[Richard Colella <[e-mail]>]

The Directory SIG met last week during the OSI Implementors' Workshop.
The agenda included an item resulting from the attempts at SRI to load
the WHOIS database into X.500.  In particular, the postalAddress upper
bound constraint of 30 characters per line was too small for about half
of the 100K entries.  I had offered to carry this issue in on behalf of
the FOX effort;  I am reporting the results more widely, since I
believe this to be of general interest.

The upshot of the SIG meeting is that the SIG voted unanimously to
change the upper bound on a line to 60 characters (the number
of lines will remain at 6).  This change will be reflected in
the Working Agreements out of this meeting, and will be voted
on for inclusion into the Stable Implementation Agreements at
the September meeting.

A number of individuals were polled informally during the week
to get a reading on whether this would be a problem:

	- A representative from the USPS (since the 6x30 constraint
		is based on a UPU standard);

	- A long-standing member of the ANSI/ISO X.500 standards
		effort, who knows the X.500 history; and,

	- Folks from the MHS SIG, who build X.400 products.

The general consensus was that, not only should the Directory SIG
make this change, but it should be used as a driving function get
others to make the same change.

--Richard