Re: Locale negotiation

[nisse%lysator.liu.se@localhost (Niels Möller)]

Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%sun.com@localhost> writes:

> My current plan is to define RFC3066-like namespaces of locale
> categories and codesets, define an abstract description of locales,
> roughly matching the POSIX locale concept,

I'm not very familiar with these issues, but standardized naming of
locales and locale properties seems somewhat out of scope for the
secsh wg.

> and, finally, two extensions to SSHv2:
> 
>  - a global request for locale negotiation
>  - a channel request for setting the locales for the various categories
>    for a given channel

A channel request makes sense, and if the naming issues are solved, I
hope it should be fairly simple.

I don't know how the negotiation is supposed to work, if you want to
transfer the settings from the local environment to the remote
session, then how it ought to work is:

  1. Client encodes the information in some standard form for
     transmission over the wire.

  2. Server decodes the information.

  3. Server applies the information to the session, as good as it can.

  4. Server reports back to the client to which extent the locale
     settings could be applied.

In the case that the server can't support your settings, to me there
seems not to be much to negotiate about.

One could provide a preference lists for things like languages and
charsets and negotiate about that, but I'm not sure that really helps
in practice. I would expect the applications on the server side to
have verying levels of localization, which the ssh server won't have
much control or knowledge about.

So if you have a preference lists, what you should do is to propagate
that list to the applications; negotiating with the server seems
pointless.

Anyway, I think the channel request should be specified so that it is
independent of the negotiation/locale-query mechanism.

> Which of these I-Ds, if any, should be SECSH WG work items?

The channel request, and the global request (if one really is needed)
would fit here, I guess.

Personally, I'd encourage you to start with a "locale-req%sun.com@localhost",
share the spec informally with other implementors who are interested,
and take it to the wg for standardization when there's some more
experience with it. Or perhaps you've done that already?

I think the handling of "keyboard-interactive" in the wg was somewhat
unfortate; there's a draft and one early implementation. At the time
other implementors read the spec carefully, the installed base is
already large enough that it is a serious argument against all
changes, improvements and bug-fixes of the spec. The effect is that
much of the implementation experience can't easily be taken into
account.

> Which WG, if any, is the most appropriate home for the more generic of
> these items?

No idea, I don't know very much about localization.

Regards,
/Niels