I considered contacting current SUSE maintainers of package openldap2.

In preparation to that I tried to find out which bug caused this patch to be developed.

AFAIK the patch is not applied to the package anymore: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/network:ldap/openldap2

And I have no reference to further information.

To OpenLDAP devs: Does Howard's patch still make sense? Is it worth to dig into SUSE's bugzilla to find out more?