[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH 0081] Skip referrals when converting LDAP result to LDAPEntry

[Petr Spacek]

On 25.7.2013 09:03, Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jul 2013, Petr Spacek wrote:
>> On 24.7.2013 22:18, Tomas Babej wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> When converting the result obtained by python-ldap library,
>>> we need to skip unresolved referral entries, since they cannot
>>> be converted.
>>>
>>> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/3814
>>
>> I'm not sure if a simple 'skip it' approach is the right one. Shouldn't it
>> print/log a warning at least? Do you know all implications? Are you sure
>> that this will not break something else silently?
>>
>> (BTW isn't the right approach to fix python-ldap? Or is it a quirk in AD?)
> AD DC often answers with proper result and then several referrals to
> other internal resources to complement the search if you are asking for
> wide-open search (default). We are not interested in these referrals for
> various reasons, including the fact that we are looking at the
> authoritative DC and it has all the needed info.
>
> At best, we could define an option that forces us doing referral chasing
> to fetch remaining results but this is not something really needed right
> now.

I understand that we don't need referrals now, but the question is 'Could it 
break something? Silently? In the future?'.

E.g. the option 'follow referrals' (defaulting to False) is IMHO much much better.

The point is that we don't need to implement referral chasing right now, just 
thrown an exception if somebody tries to switch 'follow referrals' option to 
True. IMHO this will prevent surprises in the future, because it is absolutely 
clear that referrals are not followed.

-- 
Petr^2 Spacek