Shibboleth Developers

["Scott Cantor" <>]

Etan Weintraub wrote on 2010-02-02:
> I understand...and I'm not sure is my answer. I can see it making it easier
> for initial deployments, but I think when I have to add attributes later, I
> see myself forgetting that I have to modify attribute-encoder.xml also,
> hence why I wanted the option of keeping it in the single file.

I tend to believe it's the sort of thing that helps people initially and then 
becomes a cause of errors later for the reason you're suggesting.
 
I would say if it's simple and maintainable (in the code) to support both, 
that's fine, but I always err on the side of the ongoing usage needs.

An analogy in the SP is that it was tricky to come up with a filtering 
stategy that reused the IdP filter syntax but didn't require that adding 
attributes to the mapping file also require adding them to the filter policy, 
but I felt very strongly that it would be a disaster to do that.

My other suggestion to deal with clutter is to use defaults and bump some 
things up onto the attribute definitions to enable instantiation of decoders 
for the common cases, so that only some of them actually need explicit 
declarations.

-- Scott