OpenLDAP: weirdness with slapd.conf vs. slapd.d/

[O. Hartmann]

Hello,
while fiddling around with OpenLDAP 2.3.37 as taken from the ports 
collection I revealed something strange. Looking at the manpage of slapd 
I was taught that if neither -F nor -f option is applied when the SLAPD 
starts, default config directory /usr/local/etc/openldap/slapd.d/ is 
searched for dn=config.ldif. So I did, I configured my own 
dn=config.ldif file as it is described in chapter 5 and 6 of the 
OpenLDAP Administrator's documentation. But with FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT and 
the port I run into something strange not being consistent with the 
documentation: the start of the slapd server was avoided by an error 
telling me there wasn't any readable slapd.conf file. What is that? Test 
with slaptest tells a syntactically correct slapd.d/ directory, but 
slapd won;t start. Touching an empty slapd.conf let the server start.

The documents tell one that slapd.conf is a kind of deprecated, but it 
seems still in use.

On the other hand, typing in the configuration taken from the 
Administrator's guide of OpenLDAP as found in chapters 5,6 does not 
work! Strange.

Regards,
Oliver