LDAP support and UTF-8?

[Pavel Janík]

Hi,

I have spend some time today to make LDAP working in my setup and have
some minor notes/ideas:

- current net/ldap.el is ready to ldapsearch from OpenLDAP version 1. Now,
  the version 2 is more widely used and its output is incompatible with the
  ldap.el expectations. One of the arguments which is used in ldap.el
  ("-B") is not used in ldapsearch version 2.

- the smallest modification which allows to use OpenLDAP version 2's
  ldapsearch is to set ldap-ldapsearch-args to ("-L" "-L" "-t" "-x").

  -L -L options are for LDIF v1 output format

  -t (-t -t efectively, because we already use -t in ldap.el) is to use
  temporary files for all fields (which ldap.el expects)

- I use this patch which allows me to see ISO 8859-2 characters in
  eudc-query-form output. Temporary files are in UTF-8 so we must read them
  as such. I do not know however, what efect will this have on jpegPhoto
  and similar fields, because I can not test it right now :-( Do you agree
  with this patch? I see a small problem here - you must save the output
  from eudc-query-form in UTF-8 then, but this is no problem for me.

--- ldap.el.~1.4.~      Sat Dec 29 18:30:25 2001
+++ ldap.el     Tue Jan  1 19:11:43 2002
@@ -590,7 +590,8 @@
            (save-excursion
              (set-buffer bufval)
              (erase-buffer)
-             (insert-file-contents-literally value)
+             (let ((coding-system-for-read 'utf-8))
+               (insert-file-contents value))
              (delete-file value)
              (setq value (buffer-substring (point-min) (point-max))))
            (setq record (cons (list name value)

- I have an idea: make default values for ldap-ldapsearch-args to be ready
  for version 2 of OpenLDAP which is more widely used and make a note in
  etc/PROBLEMS about the right value for version 1. Or maybe we can define
  a switch in the ldap.el alone: if ldap-ldapsearch-args is nil, the value
  of ldap-ldapsearch-version1-args or ldap-ldapsearch-version2-args will be
  used depending on the value of ldap-ldapsearch-version. What do you
  think?

BTW - How many of you use LDAP? OpenLDAP version 1 or 2?
-- 
Pavel Janík

Well, after spending a lot of time hacking on Emacs you develop
a particular intimacy with point.  A sort of friendship which
doesn't allow for "the" to appear in front of "point" any more.
                  -- Stefan Monnier in comp.emacs