On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:44:00 +0100 Michael Ströder michael@stroeder.com wrote:
Michael Smith wrote:
And there were a couple of attribute types (like telephoneNumber and, I believe, 'manager') where I had to go into the schema files and change the syntax type
You should not change the schema files shipped with OpenLDAP. You should find another solution for sanitizing the data.
Of course not. It's a dirty business, computing.
This was largely an organizational culture issue; people had gotten used to putting all kinds of crazy stuff in telephoneNumber, and nobody but nobody understood that 'manager' was supposed to be a DN.
Apart from that, of course, one could have written scripts to canonicalize telephoneNumber and maybe convert a certain number of common names to DNs for the 'manager' attribute. But the amount of manual cleaning-up that would have been required, even after the scripts had done their work, would have been prohibitive.
It was an interesting and enlightening experience. Organizations get used to using their technology in a certain way and for certain purposes. One they've formed their praxis around a lax standard, it's very hard to tighten up. It feels to the users like you're taking something away and imposing rules for rules' sake, without any practical need.
Is this what economists mean by "path dependency"?