openldap/contrib/whois++/BUGS

This is not really a bugs list (would I admit to having bugs? :-) but a
limitations list.

This implementation attempts to implement most of the proposed whois++
interface but those sections that conflict with the underlying X.500 service
are not implemented. This includes such things as the indexing service. While
it would be possible to provide this functionality it is likely that a
production X.500 Directory will have restrictions on access to the Directory
in order to prevent "trawling" of data. It is unlikely that such a site
would wish to allow an indexing server carte blanche access to it's data in
order to index it.

The current version also doesn't support multiple languages, this is not
because I don't think it's a good idea (I do), but rather due to my wish to
get this thing out of the door! As a result of this attributes are returned
using their X.500 attribute names rather than using "whois++" names. Once
the code to do multi-lingual support has been integrated these attributes
will be returned in the natural language specified by the client.

Some responses are returned as system messages, and some are returned as
normal messages (with or without a leading space). At present there is no
real consistancy, which is a result of me coding whatever I thought was best
at the time. The current draft lacks adequate direction (except for search
results) as to the format of responses but once this has been fixed I will
correct the code.

I am using a beta version of the LDAP beta code (possibly not the latest
version) to develop this code but you should be able to use any of the
University of Michigan releases, although the patches to the main Makefile
may need some tweaking.

This program has only really been tested with Ultrix although John Farrell
of the ISODE Consortium threw it at SunOS for me so it may work with other
Unix variants but there are no guarantees.

Mark Prior
26 April 93