[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH 0236] ipaldap: Fallback to string if datetime conversion went wrong

[Jan Cholasta]

On 25.6.2014 18:25, Petr Viktorin wrote:
> On 06/25/2014 05:29 PM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 25.6.2014 17:17, Tomas Babej wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Our datetime conversion does not support full LDAP Generalized
>>> time syntax. In the unsupported cases, we should fall back
>>> to string representation of the attribute.
>>>
>>> In particular, '0' is used to denote no value of LDAP generalized
>>> time attribute.
>>>
>>> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/4350
>>
>> NACK, this beats the purpose of decoding of the values, because it
>> requires you to check the type of the value before using it.
>>
>> Instead, you should either fix the code that uses the
>> nsds5ReplicaLastUpdate{Start,End} attributes to access their raw value
>> directly, or exclude the attributes from decoding to datetime by
>> overriding their type in IPASimpleLDAPObject._SYNTAX_OVERRIDE.
>>
>> Honza
>>
>
> I agree that just returning a string when conversion fails is the wrong
> thing to do.
>
> I think that if LDAP generalized can contain the empty/invalid value, we
> should convert the '0' to what Python uses for that -- None.
>

But None already means "empty attribute".

-- 
Jan Cholasta