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Re: schema

Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote: 

That is, publishing the schema description
in the subschema subentry now, before consensus within the LDAP
community has been reached with regard to its syntax and semantics,
will cause significant problems down the road, especially if
the consensus is to significantly alter their syntax and semantics.

Well, maybe if an LDAP application automatically retrieves a schema element from sub schema sub entry it will cause less hassle than people manually retrieving it from somewhere (e.g. OpenLDAP source) spreading it all over on mailing lists. Guess which distribution way is harder to control... ;-)

> I would say that an application needs to be coded (no necessarily
> [..]
> must understand the semantics of those elements.

I concur regarding semantics.

>  As the schema does impart semantical knowledge,
                    ^^^
Did you forget the "not" here?

> (It's not even good for detecting whether or not the server "supports"
> the elements the application "knows" about.)

Depends on what "supports" mean. To stay with your group admin example off course you cannot derive whether existence of 'groupOfNames' has anything to do with the access control on the LDAP server or if the server is only capable of storing those kind of entries.

> Now, if your application is a general directory browser coded with
> knowledge of how to display certain syntaxes, then I can see how
> obtaining attribute value syntax information may be valuable to
> you.

Well, actually it's not sufficient to only have syntax knowledge. Or better say the syntax definition in an attribute type declaration is not sufficient to determine the syntax actually used...

>  I would assume such a browser would either ignore values of
> syntaxes it did not know (or wasn't able to determine) or display
> such values using some "safe" mechanism (such as what it uses
> for values it knows have syntax OCTET STRING).

That's exactly what I'm doing with some extra code to avoid dumb fall-back to OCTET STRING for attributes like e.g. entryUUID...

Ciao, Michael.