[Ietf-not43] contact lookups: the elephant in my room

[Eric A. Hall]

on 4/1/2003 5:01 AM william at elan.net wrote:

> On this topic, the only easy way to do distributed search is to have 
> unified index server.

I agree that this is feasible, and its an approach I've advocated too. But
it's really an ad-hoc solution to the problem, and is not viable as the
standards-track solution to the problem. For example, if this were the
standards-track solution, there would have to be a universally available
catalog server, there would have to be specs on cache times, there would
have to be mandates for replication, and so forth. All of this is likely
to happen through ad-hoc free-market development, but its not practical to
force this as "the one true way".

There's a couple of other secondary factors here. One factor is that using
a catalog server may not even require any protocol specification; in the
case of the LDAP-WHOIS approach, you could use existing LDAP search
mechanisms to search *any* attribute in the cache (not just email address,
but city, phone number, whatever). Describing how to do searches of any
given attribute (or all of them) would be redundant and possibly even
harmful (if we don't specify "begins with" queries, are they legal?).

Anyway, I agree with you that this is likely to be the practical solution
in the long-term, but I don't think its something we should try to
standardize at this point.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/