Embrace, extend and extinguish

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Is it really a good idea to accept several field names for the same
object attribute when adding new object in Nikita?  Thomas mentioned on
#nikita yesterday that the code accept both the norwegian attributes
listed in the official specification, and english attribute names to
make life easier for english speaking students.  Is this really a good
idea?

What should happen if a POST list both the norwegian and english
attributes?  What if some attibutes are norwegian and the other are
english?  Should mixing allowed?

I believe having multiple attribute names is going to cause
compatibility problems and introduce unneeded bugs.

I am sure there are many good reasons to deviate from the specification,
but every time we do so we make life harder for applications trying to
talk to us over the documented protocol.  Is it really worth it for
this?

I must admit, it seem a bit similar to how Microsoft extended the LDAP
protocol to allow paging of attributes for LDAP objects with very many
attributes (like groups with many members).  It is a very good idea and
should probably be included in the LDAP specification.  But the change
is breaking all LDAP compliant clients ability to use Active Directory
as a reliably LDAP server. :/

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen