Re: multivalued sorting (ITS#3650)

[ando@sys-net.it]

Please keep discusions on this ITS on the ITS list.

b.hallinger@ergonaz.net wrote:

> Does that mean, it will get never fixed?

Likely.  I don't really see an issue and, to be honest, I don't even 
understand why sorting is provided at all in the library: it has nothing 
to do with LDAP itself, and one should implement one's own sorting based 
on one's own requirements which may differ from client to client, as 
your problem is showing.  For instance: you may want  to sort in 
ascending or descending order.  If you are sorting for multivalued 
attrs, then if you want the best case, you'll want to consider only the 
lowest and the highest of the values, respectively; but if you want the 
worst case, you'd want the highest and the lowest, respectively.  
Furthermore, the client has no schema knowledge, so sorting 2 and 15 in 
ascending order yields 15, 2.  Maybe you'd prefer integer sorting in 
this case?

> And what is that about the tombstone you are talking about?
> (i don't know abaout the discussion about server side sorting, could 
> you please
> summarize it for me?)

It's a request for implementing server side sorting, something tht was 
described in RFC 2891 but poses a number of problems and is not likely 
to be implemented any time for a number of reasons, namely scalability 
and resource consumption, but also the difficulty (read impossibility) 
to define univoquely what "sorting" is: different clients may have 
different sorting criteria.  To read more, follow this thread:
<http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200503/msg00803.html>

p.



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