[Freeipa-devel] [Design Review Request] V4/Automatic_Certificate_Request_Generation

[Ben Lipton]

On 07/25/2016 05:07 AM, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-07-25 at 10:50 +0200, Jan Cholasta wrote:
>> Anyway, my main grudge is that the transformation rules shouldn't
>> really
>> be stored on and processed by the server. The server should know the
>> *what* (mapping rules), but not the *how* (transformation rules). The
>> *how* is an implementation detail and does not change in time, so
>> there's no benefit in handling it on the server. It should be handled
>> exclusively on the client, which I believe would also make the whole
>> thing more robust (it would not be possible for a bug on the server
>> to
>> break all the clients).
> W/o entering in specific +1 as a general comment on this.
> If it can be done on the client, probably better be done there.
>
> Simo.
>
My thinking was that while the CSR generation must be done on the 
client, the retrieval and formatting of the data for the CSR should be 
done on the server, so that the functionality is available to all 
consumers of the API (ipa command-line, certmonger, Web UI, something 
else?). I imagine it would be relatively easy to move the formatting 
stuff into the ipa CLI, but all the other clients would then need an 
implementation of their own, and so we'd need to worry about 
interpreting the templates and generating CSRs in multiple different 
languages. It's true that as it stands a bug on the server could break 
all the clients, but on the other hand there's only one implementation 
to maintain, rather than a different one in each client.

But maybe I'm not seeing the proper priorities here. Perhaps it's more 
of a problem because clients are easier to update with bugfixes than the 
server? Or maybe the preference for the client is for scalability 
reasons? Could you tell me more about why you prefer a client 
implementation?

(And yeah, everything here carries a disclaimer of "I probably can't 
make any large changes in the remaining 3 weeks of my internship," but I 
think it's still good to know and document what the limitations of the 
current implementation are.)

Thanks,
Ben