Re: LDAP backend anyone?

[monkeyiq <monkeyiq users sourceforge net>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> "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.

I played around with this late last year... I presume the talk here is 
about that code :/ It worked fine for me here, and I was always hoping to
get it into the main tree. Since then I have moved to using ferris for
VFS and config data, though there is still interest in gconf on my part.

> 
> >         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.

The solution I took was to take a DN for the root of the config data, and
store everything in a hierarchical filesystem-like structure on the LDAP side.
As LDAP is hierarchical in nature this seemed to be a decent solution. 
Though my RFC at the time merited 0 replies of ppl wishing to talk about the
layout. Since then I have read more books on LDAP, so I am in a better position
for the "management" side of LDAP now.

> 
> >         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. 

I also hacked a more virtualized backend subAPI at the time IIRC, though there
was not too much to that.

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