Re: Integrated Directory Service.

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

Jorge Gomes Silva <jgs@plurimarketing.pt> writes:

> On Monday, August 02, 1999 8:58 PM, Bruce Stephens 
> [SMTP:bruce@cenderis.demon.co.uk] wrote:

[...]

> > What would Gnome use a directory for?

> Well in Windows you can do things like sharing directories to allow
> other ppl to access information in your machine. If you do that
> you'll probably want to specify which users in the network will have
> access to your shares/information. You'll need a directory service
> for that.

This makes sense.  I don't see that it's Gnome, however.

> I worked with some big companies and one of the things most of them
> demanded was "Roaming/Network user profiles". With Network profiles
> (which Windows provides), a user can logon at any computer,
> validates himself with a directory service on the network (a.k.a
> Domain Controller in Windows) , and gets its profile from the
> directory service. In that way a user's desktop always looks the
> same, independently of the computer where the user logged on. This
> kind of feature is very useful in bank branches where the user can
> logon in different computers at different times.

Gnome is likely to work on something close to a Unix, so it's not
unreasonable to assume that your home directory is available anyway.
And that means configuration files would automatically be available.

How realistic is a situation where I'm likely to log on anywhere, not
have access to my home directory, and yet want to have access to all
sorts of personal configuration?  It's common with Windows, but not
with Unix.

In any case, I'd suggest that technically, ACAP (RFC2244) is better
for relatively rapidly changing things like configuration information.
I just don't think LDAP is designed for keeping track of the layout of
all my application windows, or my address book.

> These are two examples of using a directory service for "desktop
> functions". Other uses may occur, like storing mail addresses
> (important in big organizations), etc.

Absolutely---directories are designed for holding things like a
corporate phone/email directory and things.  But not, IMHO, personal
address books, or random configuration stuff.

However, directories probably *are* going to end up doing this, if
only because of Microsoft.  (ACAP doesn't seem to have taken the world
by storm.)  

gconf sounds good---that way, Gnome applications could presumably use
a directory, if that's what you wanted.  I think it would be cool for
Gnome to have a directory user agent, too (using LDAP, specifically
addressing the openLDAP server).

Not that I'm particularly disappointed that directories are becoming
trendy.  I work for a company one of whose products is an LDAP/X.500
directory (open standards, but certainly not open source, or free
software).