I see what you are saying, the problem as I see it is that the action we are taking here is "disable chasing ldap referrals". If the name is ldapreferrals and we use a boolean then setting it to 1 reads in a counter intuitive manner:
That assumes that the default in the ldap library is always going to be to chase them. Does the standard somehow mandate that it should be?
"set ldapreferals=true to disable chasing LDAP referrals."
You'd obviously reverse the meaning as well. "set ldapreferals=false to disable chasing LDAP referrals."
Perhaps you are fine with this though if it's documented? It does work in the inverse way to pam_ldap, where setting to true enables referral chasing. pam_ldap works like so:
not set : library default
set to 0 : disable referral chasing
set to 1 : enable referral chasing
That is exactly what I'm suggesting it should do, and I'm pretty sure that's what Peter suggested as well.