hyc@symas.com wrote in ITS#8240:

Our patch response was too hasty. There is no OpenLDAP bug here, the real issue is production binaries being built with asserts enabled instead of compiling with -DNDEBUG. That's an issue for packagers and distros to resolve. Closing this ITS, not an OpenLDAP bug.

Maybe I missed something. But this is the first time I've heard about -DNDEBUG being mandatory when compiling binary packages for production use. Does it have other effects?

And what are general rules for assert statements in OpenLDAP code?

In my own (Python) code assert statements are supposed to be only triggered if something goes wrong *internally* (type issues etc.). If somebody manages to trigger an assert statement with invalid input from "outside" I always consider this to be a serious bug revealing insufficient error handling even though e.g. web2ldap just logs the exception but won't crash. YMMV, but please clarify.

I also wonder whether there are more mandatory rules for building packages and where I can find them.

Please don't get me wrong: My inquiry is in good faith to avoid unnecessary ITS based on misunderstanding.

Ciao, Michael.