177394 - Document the ASN.1 templates and the classic and QuickDER decoders.

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(NSS :: Documentation, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Wan-Teh Chang]

The documentation should include the following.

1. The structure of the ASN.1 templates and the
various macros.

2. Differences between the classic and QuickDER
decoders.

3. Problems with the classic QuickDER decoder,
such as the unimplemented features, memory usage,
and potential memory leaks on decoding failure.

4. Requirements of the QuickDER decoder on the
lifetime of the DER input and the arena.

5. Limitations of the QuickDER decoder, such as
no BER and indefinite decoding.

Comment 1

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Moved to target milestone 3.8 because the original
NSS 3.7 release has been renamed 3.8.

Comment 2

[Julien Pierre]

Attachment: documentation corrected with Nelson and Ian's feedback

Comment 3

[Julien Pierre]

I incorporated changes into the attached HTML document in response to Ian and
Nelson's questions before I went on vacation.
Please let me know if any more changes are needed. If not, please add a review.
The document should go somewhere on mozilla.org .

Comment 4

[Wan-Teh Chang]

I suggested that we create a "tech-notes" subdirectory
under http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/,
and check in documents like this one as NSS tech notes.
They would be named tn1.html, tn2.html, etc.

I guess this one can be tn1.html :-)

Comment 5

[Julien Pierre]

Attachment: final version

Comment 6

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 109271 [details]
final version

Changed MIME type for that "final" version to text/html so I can read it with
the brwoser.

Comment 7

[Julien Pierre]

Unless there is more feedback, I think this version should be published on
mozilla.org and the bug closed.

Comment 8

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Comment on attachment 109271 [details]
final version

Julien, I've added this page to our web site as NSS
Technical Note 1.  It will show up in a couple of hours at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/tech-notes/tn1.html.

Comment 9

[Julien Pierre]

closing

Comment 10

[Julien Pierre]

verified page is up