Gervase Markham wrote: Sounds to me like you haven't read the slapd.access(5) manpage. The answer is "yes." Read the section on "THE <ACCESS> FIELD" in the manpage. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Gervase Markham wrote: Note that a "Guide" is not a reference manual; it is not intended to be complete or exhaustive. It's only intended to provide an overview; the detailed/exhaustive docs are always the manpages. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Gervase Markham wrote: It's certainly been the norm for Unix at least. E.g., compare the Guides vs Reference Manuals in the Solaris documentation. http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/index.html Or the 4BSD system documentation: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/bibliography.html Material in the 4BSD User's Supplementary Documents and Programmer's Supplementary Documents was a bit more friendly in prose, but only explained the approach to how to use the system. The details of each command or function are only found in the Reference Manuals. The preface.html which you linked above clearly states: Scope of this Document This document provides a guide for installing OpenLDAP Software 2.4 (http://www.openldap.org/software/) on UNIX (and UNIX-like) systems. The document is aimed at experienced system administrators with basic understanding of LDAP-based directory services. This document is meant to be used in conjunction with other OpenLDAP information resources provided with the software package and on the project's site (http://www.OpenLDAP.org/) on the World Wide Web. The site makes available a number of resources. ... <<<< And then goes on to list various other resources. The Manual Pages, of course are the most obvious information resource provided directly with the software, and in Unix they are traditionally the authoritative reference. Given the heritage of this project it seems obvious to me that this is how the docs would be structured. If the phrase "meant to be used in conjunction" isn't a strong enough hint that the Guide is not a standalone document, please feel free to suggest an alternate or stronger wording. Note that the preface also invites you to do the same. Thank you for your feedback. We're always listening. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Gervase Markham wrote: Point taken. Though I would say familiarity with all of them is needed when you run into a problem that isn't addressed in the formal docs. GNU is Not Unix. Interesting reference. A couple of comments 1) They specifically need to call out this point, because they clearly are going against established practice in making this point. 2) As much as I am a supporter of the GNU project, not all of their policies actually make sense. E.g., the recommended viewer for their docs is Emacs. Their philosophy has been "since memory is now plentiful and cheap on computers, it's OK to use as much as you want without any second thought" since the late 1980s. I dunno about you, but I run OpenLDAP on my Android G1 phone, and I *don't* run emacs or tex on it. Bytes of RAM and individual CPU cycles are still scarce resources in the real world. Not at all, I was merely giving a counter-example to yours, showing that there's a method to this madness and it is in fact a time-honored one. Frankly, anybody who has been to school in the past century should recognize it, because it's the standard model for educational texts. Just like a handbook on (e.g. English) grammar is not a complete reference to a language - it's simply a guide that gives the rules on how atoms fit together. It gives examples on how sentences are constructed but that's by no means a statement that those examples are the only possible sentences. There are dictionaries to provide more complete references to all the available atoms, and you are expected to construct your own sentences using the combination of those rules and those available atoms. Fair enough. But again, as the preface states, suggestions/changes should be posted to the ITS so that they may be tracked. We'll have to think about how to integrate these hyperlinks into the Guide. IMO we should not be encouraging people to rely on the web as their first source of information; their first source of information should always be the man pages that are already installed on their own hard drives. The reasons being 1) the manpages on their machine will most likely match the release of the code that's actually running on their machine. We see a lot of problems from people who read current documentation on the web site but they're in fact running a 5-6 year old release that their distro provided, and they wonder why some feature they tried to use didn't work (wasn't there). (We also occasionally get the opposite, someone followed a link from an outdated HOWTO to an old version of the Guide, tho they are running current code.) 2) relying on a remote server for documentation is dicy at best, especially when you're in the middle of a disaster and you need the info Right Now and your network has failed. We could provide HTML-formatted copies of the manpages in the Guide but IMO that's a waste of space. There already are multiple references to slapd.access in the Access Control chapter, but I've added another at the top of the chapter as a result of this conversation. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/

Gervase Markham wrote: Yes, see "add" level (cfr.. "a" permission) in slapd.access(5). p.