Parsing Contextual Objects again

[Jeremy Hylton]

>>>>> "MS" == Michael Ströder <michael at stroeder.com>> writes:

  >> The second decode call gets the directoryName that is tagged with
  >> [4].

  MS> Yes. But this is the ASN.1 type GeneralName (which holds a
  MS> distinguished name in the above example). But I would expect a
  MS> sequence (type GeneralNames, not GeneralName)!

I also expect a sequence, but that's not what is encoded!  I am fairly
confident that this part of the decoding is correct.  I've confirmed
it with Peter Gutmann's dumpasn1 program.  (output attached)

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The sequence that results from the decoding appears to be the
RDNSequence for the Name [4].

>Name            ::=   CHOICE { -- only one possibility for now --
>                                 rdnSequence  RDNSequence }
>
>RDNSequence     ::=   SEQUENCE OF RelativeDistinguishedName
>
>DistinguishedName       ::=   RDNSequence
>
>RelativeDistinguishedName  ::=
>                    SET SIZE (1 .. MAX) OF AttributeTypeAndValue

  >> The decode method modifies the contextual object in place,

  MS> Aaaaaaaah! I will try using module copy now...

Why?  It modifies the object in place only so that after calling
decode, the repr method is more helpful.  I think it would be wasteful
to copy it.

Jeremy