eduPersonTargetedID not being sent as persistent

[Cantor, Scott]

On 1/8/20, 11:36 AM, "users on behalf of Mak, Steve" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of makst at upenn.edu> wrote:

> If this is through InCommon, EverFi does not seem to declare a NameIDFormat preference which will resolve to
> "unspecified" to the IdP logic without some additional work.

InCommon actually doesn't support the insertion of NameIDFormat elements into its metadata, though the other eduGAIN-imported metadata does have some.

The reasoning for that is multi-fold:

- NameIDs are bad, wrong, a pain in the ass, best-avoided, never use them, etc., so encouraging any use of them is the last thing federations should do
- Practically speaking, most actual requirements for NameID are from commercial vendors without well-defined or even in some cases logical approaches to user identification, and tend to just want "whatever, just send us the email in it" or misuses of the Formats or other anti-patterns
- The most common case is for the particular Format to use to depend on the overall provisioining integration with the service and often will be IdP-specific, so it doesn't work to dictate the Format in metadata shared through a federation for consumption by multiple IdPs

So in the end, I actively discouraged InCommon supporting the element the last time it was discussed.

FWIW.

-- Scott