Nick Milas wrote:
On 3/7/2011 2:18 πμ, Howard Chu wrote:
We've been discussing this problem for quite a while. My current thinking is that somehow we can use attribute options to help. Visually it might be better to associate the option with the original attribute, e.g. olcAccess: olcAccess;x-comment: This would require defining a new (and strange) type of attribute option though, since the value with the option has no relation (syntactically) to the original attribute type.
Thank you for this discussion.
I think it might not matter which of the two is the implementation, as long as the "description" (either "olcWhatever;x-comment:" or "description;x-olcWhatever:") is available and multi-valued for each and every attribute and if it can easily stay together with the entry concerned, and easily displayed in relation to it as well (yes, visual behavior for comments is important!). For example, for olcAccess, modifying an example from: http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/access-control.html, if we create the attribute values:
olcAccess: to attrs=member,entry by dnattr=member selfwrite description;x-olcAccess: (0) Access rules for attrs: member,entry description;x-olcAccess: (0) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012 olcAccess: to dn.children="dc=example,dc=com" by * search description;x-olcAccess: (1) Allow search on children of example.com description;x-olcAccess: (1) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012 olcAccess: to dn.children="dc=com" by * read description;x-olcAccess: (2) Allow only read on children of com description;x-olcAccess: (2) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012
Interleaved values such as above may never be returned by an LDAP Search operation. Whether it's desirable for a client to reorganize the data to display as such, I have no opinion.
I note that the accesslog overlay already allows you to track the history of individual changes to attributes, so recording an "Entered by <name> on <date>" comment seems both redundant and vague.
we should be able to easily display:
olcAccess: {0}to attrs=member,entry by dnattr=member selfwrite description;x-olcAccess: (0) Access rules for attrs: member,entry description;x-olcAccess: (0) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012 olcAccess: {1}to dn.children="dc=example,dc=com" by * search description;x-olcAccess: (1) Allow search on children of example.com description;x-olcAccess: (1) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012 olcAccess: {2}to dn.children="dc=com" by * read description;x-olcAccess: (2) Allow only read on children of com description;x-olcAccess: (2) Entered by Nick on 7/12/2012I assume, all the above should be easier and more intuitive to achieve using the "olcAccess;x-comment:" approach (even if it's more difficult - as you say - to implement).