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I had a conceptual question, and was (rightly) told that it did not fit into the scope of serverfault. Looking around, I found that there is a QA site for conceptual questions for programmers, but not for sysadmins.

I think it would be nice though to discuss concepts with other admins. Why don't we have a site like that? Is it that admins are not so interested in concepts? Or am I just the first with this problem and should make a suggestion on area 51 for such a site?

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    Last time we tried this it got closed on A51 as a dupe of SF by a bunch of A51 users who don't use SF.
    – user9517
    Aug 15, 2013 at 7:34
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    ^ But like the murphy's, we're not bitter. Just very very annoyed, now that I remember it.
    – Rob Moir
    Aug 15, 2013 at 12:22
  • What is a conceptual question? I think most of my questions are conceptual--- if I understood the concept I wouldn't be asking the question and I would be able to solve my problem. Aug 15, 2013 at 23:28

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It depends on your definition of "Conceptual" --

"Why does X have feature and Y not?" is a pretty nearly unanswerable question ("Because Y's developers didn't implement it" is THE answer, but it's a pretty shitty answer, and totally unhelpful). I can't think of a SE site where it would fit because nothing on the network focuses on speculation.
Your question falls into this category as best as I can tell -- the only people who could really answer this are the OpenLDAP developers.

"Where would you use feature?" is an interesting category of conceptual questions -- these really don't fit on Server Fault ("Solution in search of a problem" doesn't work well), but there is value in some of these questions.
Your question almost falls into this category (the second part is "Why would I use this attribute?") -- that's the type of answer you got, and I think it's probably the most useful :)

"I've got these requirements, and I'm considering this architectural solution - Does my idea suck?" is a category of practical conceptual solutions that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
These can be really AWFUL "do my work for me!" questions which need to die in a fire, or they can be good, detailed questions asking about specific concerns with a proposed solution which can develop into good resources. The latter definitely belong on Server Fault.

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    "Because Y's developers didn't implement it" is THE answer, but it's a pretty shitty answer, and totally unhelpful Let's face it, even if the developer reads the question by some coincidence and answers it, knowing that something wasn't implemented because "I ran out of time" or "I think it sucks" doesn't really change the product or our need to take it on and use it or not based on what it does rather than does not do.
    – Rob Moir
    Aug 15, 2013 at 14:32
  • "the only people who could really answer this are the OpenLDAP developers." - Agreed. I was hoping thought that maybe someone allready asked these questions to the developers, or just knew because she followed the development very closely. I asked here because I felt that it would be easier to get an answer on sf then from the openldap devs.
    – Isaac
    Aug 16, 2013 at 7:01

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