[Freeipa-devel] GeneralizedTime v.s datetime.datetime in XMLRPC

[Rob Crittenden]

John Dennis wrote:
> In parameters.py we define a GeneralizedTime object to be used as an 
> XMLRPC parameter. Why?

GeneralizedTime isn't defined as an XML-RPC paramter, just an IPA one 
and XML-RPC just comes along for the ride. We only needed support for 
RFC 4517.

> * XMLRPC defines the dateTime.iso8601 parameter value type for passing 
> date/time information
> 
> * Python has good support for date/time processing in it's datetime module
> 
> * Python's xmlrpclib supports both xmlrpclib.DateTime and 
> datetime.datetime objects.
> 
> * Python's xmlrpclib can be configured to use datetime.datetime objects 
> intead of xmlrpclib.DateTime objects if you pass use_datetime=True when 
> invoking xmlrpclib.loads(), however we don't do that. Why?

Never needed dates.

> * ISO 8601 is an internet standard for passing date time information 
> between cooperating network entities. However GeneralizedTime is only 
> valid in a subset of binary protocols (primarily LDAP and PKI)

And it is LDAP we end up speaking.

> Given that ISO 8601 is the preferred standard, that's it is directly 
> supported by XMLRPC, is compatible with datetime.datetime and the fact 
> datetime.datetime has excellent support in Python shouldn't we be using 
> datetime.datetime for all our date/time information and only convert to 
> and from GeneralizedTime for the subset of interfaces which require 
> GeneralizedTime?
> 

This could always be revisited but at the time we didn't need full-blown 
support and in fact don't want timezone information.

rob
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