sn/surname mess. Need your opinion

[Vadim Tarassov <vadim.tarassov@swissonline.ch>]

Hallo everybody,

I had today a discussion on "iplanet vs OpenLDAP" topic. During this 
discussion I've learned "attribute aliasing", whis not really doing well 
in OpenLDAP. When LDAP client asks to perform a search and to return 
value of the attribute "surname", OpenLDAP will return correct value of 
the attribute, though the attribute name can be "sn" if defined so in 
the tree. It took me 40 seconds to build a from every point of view 
valid LDAP client in Java, which will fail in this case, just because it 
expected to get the same attribute name as it asked for. It happens 
because at least in Java you can get collection of search results and 
call method get(attributeName) on the collection to get list of the 
attribute values.

Very annoying in this story is that iplanet will return attributes with 
exactly same names as it has been asked to return.

I have googled a bit, and found that Kurt once replied to someone on the 
same issue with "No LDAP technical spesification demands LDAP to return 
attributes with the same names as in LDAP quiry" or similar .... I think 
it is not really correct. What do you think? Is it a bug in Open LDAP 
which should be fixed or not?

Best regards, vadim tarassov.