Re: Alias dereferencing

[Michael Reiher <reiher@vidsoft.de>]

> > What would be the best way?
>
> The best thing to do would be to take a step back and think about
> something else for a while. Then read through the LDAP specs and gain an
> understanding of what facilities are already provided, and how to use
> them to your advantage. Some things to think about - why does your
> design require the use of aliases at all, why don't your applications
> already know the real DNs of the entries they need to operate on? 
We use LDAP for saving configuration data. There may be several configuration 
profiles. Our services always just access a generic configuration path. This 
is an alias pointing to the currently used profile. Thus our services don't 
need to care about profiles, which simplifies things a good deal. Speed 
(because entries might not be cached, or whatever) is not so important here. 
And after all, why are they there when they shouldn't be used?

> Why 
> does your design require the use of multiple backends?
This has partly historical reaons. And up to now, we used ldbm and there the 
multiple suffixes were within the same backend.

>
> Something else to think about - you should not be thinking about how to
> "fix" code that isn't broken, this shows a lack of understanding of the
Well, this (resolving aliases at any place in search base dns) used to work 
with ldbm backend in 2.0.18 (which we used up to now). Alias handling in 
2.2.x, ldbm again, has several bugs (meaning it crashed). And in 2.3.x bdb 
backend it simply doesn't work. So there is definitly something to improve ;)

> existing code. Trying to write new code before you understand the
> existing design and implementation is ... obviously a bad idea.
>
Basically you're right. I don't know the code too well. But I'm learing how to 
use it (as I need to implement a different set of ACIs anyway). And I already 
learned a good deal. So, be assured I only do changes when (I believe) I know 
what I do ;) That's why I was asking here. To find out if there is a bug, if 
it is a missing feature, if there is anything planned, if it will never be, 
and if we still want it to be in OpenLDAP how should we proceed. I'm not 
rushing into things. Maybe my questioning was a bit diffuse.

There are things like the transparent handling of aliases, which we have to 
implemet anyway. Either fixing it in OpenLDAP, or implementing it into the 
client (which would probably also be slower in the end). And as far as 
aliases pointing to other backends are concerned, that would be of the 'nice 
to have, while I'm at it' type. 

(No offense intended! :)

Greets

Michael