SoC Report / Mango Revamp

[Baris Cicek <baris teamforce name tr>]

Hi list; 

This week I started actual coding for Mango, and completed one of the
important parts of the project, module management. 

Currently modules are not handled in LDAP server, that's inevitably
obstacle for bridge between accounts team and maintainers of the
modules. 

In order to add module management into Mango new attributes and objects
were necessary for sure. They were trivial additions and not touching
other parts of the LDAP structure was a necessity. So that I've added
two objectClasses, gnomeModule, and localizationModule. That's an
extensible structure, later on other types of module definitions can be
easily be added. 

During this time, I needed to learn syntax of LDIF files and played with
them alot. I need to code a script which creates LDIF files from some
csv file for mass importing of the whole gnome modules, so that I wanted
to learn small tidbits from some books (thanks to safari.oreilly.com).
It's an easy structure as it can be, but syntax looks strange for some
reason. 

Having modified LDAP structure for module management, I've added module
adding/updating etc. features to Mango. My code is based on other parts
of Mango so it's not hard to grasp whole methodology. However if time
permits (or later) I want to refactor OOP part of the PHP code to get
benefit of language more. 

Now that I've learned ldap apis of the php, this is important for rest 
of the code. Since real magic will begin now. 

Currently my plan is to finish authentication/handshaking/tracking parts
for users before GUADEC. At GUADEC I might have chance to discuss what
should be the best approach once again, and also security improvement we
can add, so I don't want to say that this part is complete before GUADEC
anyways. I might update timeline on wiki accordingly.

Post GUADEC should be occupied by testing, security audit, bug fixing,
deuglifying interface etc. 

I'll commit my additions to GSOC_2007 branch of mango once I've finished
fostering HACKING text file. I've also added docs directory which will
(hopefully) include better documentation and all necessary structural
files (ldif files, schema files, sql files). 

Regards, 
Baris.