An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Peter Schober <peter.schober AT univie.ac.at>]

* Dick Visser <dick.visser AT geant.org> [2018-05-16 16:56]:
> My problem is that I will be perceived to be breaking things when I
> upgrade.  As usual the end user is left in the cold, as the service
> suddenly is inaccessible, with no way for them to fix it.
> In fact, I think I'd have a hard time trying to persuade a large
> institution's IdP admin to change their config at all (if that is my
> task, anyway).

I'm not saying you're not between a rock and a hard place.
(Same for ArnesAAI.)
Just that (like I said) that format was NEVER correct when the urn:oid
attribute name was used.  Not even 10 years ago.
(The ArnesAAI example was broken in more than that way, though, as
detailed previously. Missing "Scope", etc.)

The makes the main mistake having interoperated with those systems all
those years, maybe silently hoping they'd change their ways at some
point -- never mind Postel's law. :-\ Because now, with ...

> "Everything worked fine until you upgraded your SP"

this is not going to be an easy sell, I agree.

Unless you wanted to hack back in support for the invalid format I
guess there's no way around to insisting that this has always been
wrong and that finally support for this has been removed from the
/only/ software that ever had any support for this.

Of course being right never buys you anything.  I just wouldn't know
how else to motivate people to stop proliferating that stuff with no
regard to what's valid and what's not according to the standards we
agree (or here: pretend) to be using.

Interop is a 2-way street, IMHO.  At least if you're Doing It Wrong
you can have no expectation of everyone else in the world going out of
their way to accomodate your wrong behaviour. (Unless you're
Microsoft, Google, etc., of course, in which case Standards are merely
non-binding recommendations, of course...)

-peter