Russ Allbery wrote:
The Debian packaging of OpenLDAP has been carrying around the attached patch for many years now, and I'd really like to make it go away. Adding new functions to the exposed ABI of a library is really not kosher.
However, it looks like Evolution really does use this patch for its Exchange addressbook feature, it falls back on doing simple binds with passwords without it, and it is apparently still a recommended patch. I'm attaching the patch as shipped with the evolution-exchange package, although the code that actually uses it is now in evolution-data-server.
What should we do with this? Is what Evolution wants to do just broken? Obsolete in some way? Is there some other API that they could now use? I'm happy to file bugs against the corresponding Debian packages so that we can get rid of this patch, but I don't know what to tell them and don't even entirely understand what they're trying to accomplish.
If they actually wanted OpenLDAP to include these functions, the author of the patch should have contributed it to the ITS.
But without a published spec, I don't see any reason for us to adopt this patch. Where is the spec that documents this feature?