Re: Index problems: search results returning no responses

[Graham Leggett <minfrin@sharp.fm>]

Pierangelo Masarati wrote:

> Unfortunately everyone has its personal idea of the most intuitive place
> where to put things, including documentation.

In this case the most obvious place for it is pretty clear.

When software doesn't work in an obvious way for whatever reason, the 
location for the warning should go where the end user is most likely to 
introduce the misunderstanding, and in this case this means in one 
location: directly above the indexes section of the config file.

I can think of no sane usecase for needing a manual procedure for 
updating indexes manually before new indexes can be used, however this 
is the reality for the v2.2 tree. As a result when encountering this 
problem, I am simply going to think "it's a bug, let me see if others 
have had this problem in Google" rather than "it's a feature, read this 
specific doc of many". If I had seen a warning above "index" in the 
config, I would have immediately known what to do.

This kind of thing is very important, as it impacts on the perceived 
reliability of the software. An LDAP service failure is often far 
disastrous than other service failures, and the question isn't "whose 
fault was it that it went down" but "could the failure have been 
avoided". In this case yes, with a suitable warning in the right place.

> If you can point to more
> intuitive locations (based on some objective and non subjective
> measurement of intuitiveness) your contribution would be greatly
> appreciated.

In slapd.conf, like this:

# Indices to maintain for this database
# Warning: changing index settings requires rebuilding indices,
# see slapindex(8)
index objectClass                       eq,pres
index ou,cn,mail,surname,givenname      eq,pres,sub
index uidNumber,gidNumber,loginShell    eq,pres
index uid,memberUid                     eq,pres,sub
index nisMapName,nisMapEntry            eq,pres,sub

Regards,
Graham
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