On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, "Michael Ströder" wrote:
I've had it with explaining that the suffix is the root of the database which is not the rootdn which is not the Unix user "root".
[...]
IMO this renaming/aliasing will lead to even more confusion on the mailing
I'd note that the namespace pollution is nearly impossible to avoid in any reasonable manner. *ix users might be confused that it's rootdn/rootpw. But when we make admindn/adminpw Windows users might be confused that they're not related to Windows Administrator privileges. Perhaps we could call it systemdn and confuse VMS users. Almost anything short of "rootdnThatAppliesOnlyToThisBackendAndNotToAnythingElseInYourOS" is going to require a bit of interpretation in the documentation, and it's intuitively obvious (if not always properly understood) that slapd configuration configures slapd, not *ix nor the universe at large.
A couple doc patches to reinforce that "rootdn" only applies to backends and not to any client OS would probably be better in this case. I'd be for changing it if there was some unambiguous directive that could work, but I'm not so sure that such a directive could be found; stare decisis.