Re: Heads up: new schema support

[John Kristian <kristian@netscape.com>]

Julio Sánchez Fernández wrote:

> ... When all this is finished, we will have a basis for extending syntaxes
> and matching rules from loadable modules ...

This is harder than it looks.  I implemented the matching rules part, in
Netscape Directory Server 3.1, and I know the engineer who did the syntax
part.  Would you like copies of the design documents?  I'll see if I can get
permission to publish them.

A notable pitfall: the keys (for indexing or sorting) of some matching rules
need to be larger (more bytes) than the values from which they're computed.
At least, the Taligent internationalization software that Netscape used has
this property, and i18n gurus tell me other i18n software does, too.  So, key
computation cannot be done 'in place', as it is in the current slapd.  At
least, not for international matching rules.