The new backend is not 100% compatible to the old backend due to the lack of data sharing. This is a complex issue but maybe solvable with the help of the mod_perl code.
Everyone I'd seen using back-perl was using private patches that were completely incompatible anyway. ...And most were abandoned some time during the 2.1.x era.
The single-threaded nature of the existing back-perl makes it mostly useless in the modern slapds with overlays, so anything that fixes this is a huge improvement.
But if we're changing APIs... please consider a more callback oriented system, at least for the search operation. Last I looked at it, lots of time was wasted allocating and deallocating memory for the search op return value. Returning one object at a time with a separate call from perl back into slapd was a huge performance win.
Matthew Backes Symas Corporation mbackes@symas.com