So I guess this was not a bug, but a mistake in the documentation : http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/replication.html#N-Way%20Multi-Master

Can anyone confirm ?

Yes, you are correct, apologies. Ando fixed this in test050:

----------- 1.14 Sun Nov 16 22:06:30 2008 UTC; 2 months ago by ando Changed since 1.13: +28 -10 lines Diffs to 1.13 (colored diff)

add indexes when supported; syncrepl on configuration should always be refreshAndPersist -----------

and I missed it for updating the docs. The update to the guide will be in the next release, 2.4.14

I'll close this ITS now.

Thanks!