[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH] 918, 919 update sudo schema

[Jan Cholasta]

Dne 14.12.2011 16:21, Rob Crittenden napsal(a):
> Jan Cholasta wrote:
>> Dne 14.12.2011 15:23, Rob Crittenden napsal(a):
>>> Jan Cholasta wrote:
>>>> Dne 14.12.2011 05:20, Rob Crittenden napsal(a):
>>>>> The sudo schema now defines sudoOrder, sudoNotBefore and sudoNotAfter
>>>>> but these weren't available in the sudorule plugin.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've added support for these. sudoOrder enforces uniqueness because
>>>>> duplicates are undefined.
>>>>>
>>>>> I also added support for a GeneralizedTime parameter type. This is
>>>>> similar to the existing AccessTime parameter but it only handles a
>>>>> single time value.
>>>>
>>>> You should parse the date/time part of the value with
>>>> time.strptime(timestr, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S') instead of doing it manually,
>>>> that way you'll get most of the validation for free.
>>>
>>> Yes but it gives a crappy error message, just saying that some data is
>>> left over not what is wrong.
>>
>> IMHO having a separate error message for every field in the time string
>> (like you do in the patch) is an overkill, simple "invalid time" and/or
>> "unknown time format" should suffice (we don't have errors like "invalid
>> 3rd octet" for IP adresses either).
>
> Well, the work is done, hard to go back on a better error message.
>
>>>
>>>> Also, it would be nice to be able to enter the value in more
>>>> user-friendly format (e.g. "2011-12-14 13:01:25 +0100") and normalize
>>>> that to LDAP generalized time.
>>>
>>> When dealing with time there are so many ways to input and display the
>>> same values this becomes difficult.
>>>
>>> I'd expect that the times for these two attributes will be relatively
>>> simple and I somehow doubt users are going to want seconds, leap seconds
>>> or fractions, but we'll need to consider how to do it for future
>>> consistency (otherwise we could have a case where time is entered in one
>>> format for some attributes and another for others).
>>>
>>> If we input in a nice way we need to output in the same way.
>>
>> We could make the preferred input/output time format user-configurable,
>> defaulting to current locale time format. This format would be used for
>> output. For input, we could go over a list of formats (first the
>> user-configured format, then current locale format, then a handful of
>> "standard" formats like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) and use the first format
>> that can be successfully used to parse the time string.
>
> See how far you get into the rabbit hole with even this simple format?

I don't mind, as long as it is the right thing to do (IMHO) :)

Anyway, I think this could be done on the client side, so we might use 
your patch without changes. However, I would prefer if the parameter 
class was more generic, so we could use it (hypothetically) to store 
time in some other way than LDAP generalized time attribute (at least 
name it DateTime please).

>
> The LDAP GeneralizedTime needs to be either in GMT or include a
> differential. This gets us into the territory where the client could be
> in a different timezone than the server which leads us to why we dropped
> AccessTime in the first place.

Speaking of time zones, the differential alone is not a sufficient time 
zone description, as it doesn't account for DST. Is there a way to store 
time in LDAP with full time zone name (just in case it's needed sometime 
in future)?

> So I'd like the user to supply the
> timezone themselves so I don't have to guess (wrongly) and let them
> worry about differing timezones.

We don't have to guess, IIRC there is a way to get the local timezone 
differential in both Python and JavaScript, so the client could supply 
it automatically if necessary.

>
> rob

Honza

-- 
Jan Cholasta