Re: Status of ldap_init_fd and LDAP_PROTO_EXT?

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Volker Lendecke wrote:
> Hi!
>
> What's the status of those two? They are mentioned in the manpages of
> for example Debian Jessie and FreeBSD 11 (maybe from ports?), but the
> manpage explicitly says you have to #include <ldap_pvt.h>, which is
> not shipped.
>
> What's the reason of them being in ldap_pvt.h? Are they supposed to
> change in the future? The function is now more than 10 years old,
> without too much change in that decade.

Generally, <ldap.h> was only supposed to export the "official" LDAP API and 
anything that was specific to OpenLDAP's implementation was stashed in 
<ldap_pvt.h> as non-standard features. I suppose the distinction is somewhat 
meaningless these days since the last LDAP API RFC was only valid for LDAPv2 
and a version for LDAPv3 was never approved. At this point, OpenLDAP's API is 
the de facto standard. As clumsy as it may be...
> Not being able to fully asynchronously connect to a server was my main
> reason to start my own little ldap library a few years ago, so I think
> this can be useful code :-)

Talk to your distro folks about shipping the files then. The Project's policy 
is that we do source releases exclusively, and everything contained in a 
source release is intended for end-users to read and use. That is, again, the 
point of open source. It would also help if end-users read the scripts in the 
test suite and used them as examples of how to setup various configurations.
> Thanks, Volker


--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/