(For the record, I agree with most of your points; and I personally would be more satisfied with slapd.conf and reloading it on SIGHUP than I am with cn=config.)
On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 08:12:04PM +0200, Michael Ströder wrote:
Standard schema files are shipped with the source and installed with make install. slapd should simply work after make install when these schema files are used.
There was some talk, either in IRC or on -devel, of creating a way for cn=config to reference schema files (possibly LDIF) on disk rather than importing them into the config database. I think that would be an improvement. Importing schemas into cn=config is cool - especially if you want to replicate the config - but I'm not sure it's a good default.
The fact that we install schema files (LDIF and otherwise) and then never refer to them again after the initial configuration is definitely one of the ways we violate expectations of experienced sysadmins who are new to OpenLDAP.