Equally capable referrals

["Jim Sermersheim" <JIMSE@novell.com>]

Earlier we discussed the issue of "what does it mean for referrals to be equally capable of being used to progress an operation?" (See section 4.1.11 in RFC 2251)

My belief is that this requirement cannot be enforced. Especially if we allow the naming model to incorporate referral objects that may be added by an administrator. If the DSA is to follow referrals that an administrator was allowed to populate, it effectively puts the MUST requirement on the administrator, which I don't think was the original intent of the RFC.

Earlier, we had rough consensus on dropping the word "equally", but how does one control whether the URL populated in a referral are capable at all of progressing the operation?

Either by consensus, or lack of two interoperable implementations, I would like to remove the sentence altogether--along with the sentence that directly follows (which indicates that we don't really know how to enforce the requirement anyway).

Novell has an implementation that I believe follows the intent of the statement, but it does so by using a special protocol to add referrals--which is NOT at all in line with manageDSAIT and the referral object.

So, does anyone believe this statement should not be removed? If so, can you illustrate through the example of an implementation what it means, and how it may be achieved?

Jim