Re: [Fwd: GUADEC cancelled due to beer shortage]

[Dave Cridland <dave cridland net>]

On Sat Jun 26 05:42:43 2004, seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 00:40 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > The way to fix it of course is to have a central config server 
> (maybe
> > just a file server or webdav server, maybe an LDAP server though 
> LDAP
> > sucks for writes) rather than having arbitrary machines talk to 
> each
> > other.
>
> Has any consideration been given to using a modified imap server 
> for the
> storage? you could keep the data format more or less the same, the
> tricks would be auth and locking, but both of those have been 
> handled in
> imap before.
Oh, dear, please, no.

IMAP is designed to handle email messages, which have the useful 
feature that they don't change after delivery - just a very small 
amount of metadata about them does. (In IMAP's case, flags). IMAP 
takes huge advantage of this, so much so that nobody serious has used 
IMAP for storage of anything but email messages. (Yes, yes, I know 
there's a crowd of people who try to slam vCard data in each year, 
whose projects vanish into oblivion.)

LDAP, fine - it's designed as 'the one true data', but it can be 
coerced, just about, into handling per-person data, even if getting 
updates is a pain.

WebDAV, fine - after all, everything should run on port 80 to be 
taken seriously these days. Quite why we're using this dull old port 
25 for this discussion is beyond me - imagine using an old protocol 
designed for the task in hand. But yes, sarcasm aside, WebDAV can be 
coerced into handling configuration data.


> another option might be webdav but, well, webdav is a pain in the 
> arse.
>
> it might be worth looking at a lightweight feature-low imap-server 
> as a
> starting point.
Try having a play with ACAP.

Subversion, http://217.155.137.62/projects/infotrope/acapd/

(And a Python library lurking in ../python/ from the above base.)

I can't swear it's the most stable thing, yet, but it's certainly not 
too far off now, and works for me. If anyone actually does try it, 
feel free to ask me for help.

ACAP does almost everything GConf needs. I'd really like to backend 
GConf onto ACAP some day, and I will if I can find the time to learn 
glib and co.

Dave.