Re: LDAP backend anyone?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Shahms E. King" <shahms shahms com> writes:
> I was thinking about implementing Netscape roaming profiles in Galeon
> (because they're wonderful!) and it occurred to me that this
> functionality could be gained for free were I to write a LDAP backend
> for GConf instead.  so, now I've got 3 questions: 
> 
>         1. is anyone working on this? 

There's another start on an LDAP backend out there, but I haven't
looked at it yet. Check the list archives.

>         2. would there be any interest in this?

Yes, I think so. The main challenging thing is how to store the
hierarchical filesystem-like structure of GConf in the database-like
structure of LDAP, without just making a big mess. I think it'd take
some careful thought from a sysadmin perspective; because the data in
LDAP has to look reasonable from the LDAP side of things.

>         3. since I haven't yet looked at actually doing this, how
>            gracefully does GConf handle backend stuff? say, if the LDAP
>            server is unavailable will it be able to gracefully fall back
>            to using a local store?

Yes, it can do this. 

You might also investigate ACAP, that may be more a more appropriate
backend for this - ACAP maps better to the GConf way of doing things,
and is designed exactly for roaming. 

However, I don't know if there's a decent free ACAP server out there.

I think getting roaming working in Galeon is an excellent way to
approach the problem, with a concrete application to try out the
design with and see if you need any GConf modifications to make it
work.  If you do, we can investigate doing that.

Havoc