Re: LDAP Backend for Gconf?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Ben Martin <monkeyiq users sourceforge net> writes:
> 
> I posted some code years ago that did an LDAP backend for gconfd-1. I'm
> not sure how easy the patch would be to port to gconf 2 because IIRC
> there is some marshalling and vtable stuff in the patch. I've since
> moved on to scratching other itches (or the same itch another way).

It should port easily, the changes in latest are not fundamental.

> Just a heads up as to how far back you might be looking in the archives.
> 
> Also be warned that it might be very hard to get your stuff into the
> main gconf tree.

FWIW I've always felt like I should have gotten the LDAP backend in, I
just did not feel sufficiently informed to say whether it was the
right approach or would be used in practice and didn't have the time
to really get a clue.

I guess in retrospect I should just put in any backend someone wants
to work on, as non-default backends can't really break
anything. e.g. the BDB backend is still in there.

The way I would like to do the network backend is to design it from
the standpoint of the two users to worry about, first the end user, so
they want e.g. to get their settings on any machine they log into and
have it work transparently; second the sysadmin, they want it to be
trouble-free and have some convenient way to set up defaults and
lockdown settings, probably taking into account existing
infrastructure that may include things such as a network filesystem,
LDAP, kickstart, kerberos, and so on. There is just a lot of stuff to
think through here and then some dedicated hacking to go through a few
iterations of reworking to get it right.

Anyway IMO there's some pretty fun hacking to do there, and it isn't
that huge a task in terms of lines of code, but it will take a lot of
careful thought and coding. I keep hoping to be able to do it myself
sometime.

Havoc