Kurt Zeilenga wrote:
I think you simply fail to realize that the subschema publication mechanism has limitations to its usefulness. As specified, it's simply not terribly usable as an implementation-supported-feature discovery mechanism. (When LDAP was being revised, I did suggest how it could become more useful, those suggestions were not supported by the consensus of the WG. Oh well.)
Could you please point me to some related postings in the ietf-ldapbis mailing list archive?
What you suggestion, I think, is quite problematic. Saying an attribute has no equality rule is not the same as saying a particular implementation doesn't support a particular rule. If a server where to say "this attribute has no equality rule", then others (clients or servers reading this) might not apply the equality rule even though they have implemented it. That might lead to very odd behavior.
Your argument might be ok in this particular case and, as I said, I have a work-around for that particular case. But in general it's debatable whether the subschema is 1. advice to the client to do the right thing or 2. to indicate to the client what the server does. I've seen many interpretations in both directions - in discussions and in implementations.
Ciao, Michael.