Problems with multiple names per OID

[Frank Strauß <strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

I guess this is kind of an FAQ, but I could not find an explanation so 
far. If it is an FAQ, maybe someone give me just a pointer to the right 
information.

There are several cases where multiple names are defined for a single 
OID, e.g. core.schema defines the names "street" and "streetAddress" 
both for 2.5.4.9. The Administration Guide says that when attributes 
are sent they are labeled with the first name. However, the other names 
are also valid in requests. Now the problem is that some LDAP clients 
send names in their requests that are known to the LDAP server as 
"secondary" names, resulting in responses with other names than the 
ones in the request. This results in clients not being able to process 
the response correctly, although the requested data is available and 
even sent back to the client.

Examples are Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Addressbook which use 
different (but only one) names for OID 2.5.4.9 and others.

My personal impression (though I'm new to LDAP, but have quite some 
experience with SNMP/SMI, which is also heavily based on ASN.1) is that 
LDAP's design is broken in that it does send non-unique labels instead 
of unique (and more compact) OIDs in the protocol. But maybe, I'm just 
missing a way how to handle the problem correctly.