Re: sn/surname mess. Need your opinion

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 12:16 AM 3/10/2004, Michael Ströder wrote:
>Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
>>Note that the formal description [RFC2256] of the SN attribute
>>type is:
>>  ( 2.5.4.4 NAME 'sn' SUP name )
>>
>> No server is required to recognize this attribute type by any
>> name other than 'sn'.  A client which asks for 'surname' is
>> simply broken and won't interoperate broadly.
>
>So why adding alias 'surname' at all?

Well, at the time, I was thinking it that returning 'sn' for
'surname' would make the client's fault more obvious than
returning nothing for 'surname'.  In retrospect, it seems
doing so has caused some confusion (though I think it also
caused developers in the end to fix their broken clients).

>>Or, to put it another way, slapd(8) is being liberal in accepting
>>'surname' as an alias for 'sn', but strict in returning the
>>proper name for the attribute type.
>
>One could argue that according to RFC2256 OpenLDAP is too liberal here. If you don't add 'surname' as alias it's even more evident that the client is broken and we wouldn't have this discussion here.

Not sure about that.  I suspect some would try adding 'surname'
themselves (possibly as first name, ugh) and then open a thread
on our behavior is aggregating a bug in their software.

Kurt