Re: referrals question

[Mark Wahl <Mark.Wahl@Sun.COM>]

> Jim Sermersheim wrote:
> 
> It does seem unreasonable to me--maybe I'm missing something. If we end up
> hitting a reference while resolving (after an alias wass dereferenced), that
> reference might point to anything. Even if it is inside the DIT, the only
> servers holding it might not speak LDAP (perhaps they only speak DAP).
> Otherwise, I'm not sure what the provision for "other kinds of URLs" is for.

Originally in the X.500 pilot project there would have been LDAP->X.500
gateways which might need to return a referral to clients if the gateway
is unable to progress the operation itself: the gateway would be able to 
indicate that the client, if capable of DAP, could progress the operation 
itself.  And a referral or reference can contain multiple URIs.  We wanted 
also to be able to refer to multi-protocol servers, which implement LDAP 
but also DAP or maybe now DSML.  Future documents might define URIs to
represent a directory operation in these protocols.

Mark Wahl
Sun Microsystems Inc.