Re: Disconnecting -lldap from utilizing apr-util

[William A. Rowe, Jr.]

Amazing how consistently someone's vetoes only arrive after proposals
have been offered for over a week and developers had already invested
the time to author the solution they originally proposed.

Simply amazing.

Bill

On May 15, 2008 William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:

What is interesting is that a patched apr-1.3.x remains binary compatible.
Simply ./configuring --enable-dbd-dso (really should be --enable-dsos) in
combination with --with-ldap will toggle the behavior.

What breaks in terms of ***build*** behavior is that it becomes the user's
responsibility to add the result of `apu-1-config --ldap-libs` to the app's
ld bindings.  Otherwise, the non-ldap-consuming app won't have a direct
binding to libldap.  Which IMHO is how it always should be.

The question is - is this a permitted change in 1.3.0?  I believe it is, we
should not have been in the business of providing libraries in the manner
that happened for ldap.  The other accessors, expat, iconv, etc don't carry
this sort of communicative property for our util users.  In short, it was
a failed contract that should be harmonized without disrupting our users
too terribly.  The --ldap-libs query lets them resume.

But this is not far enough, and only phase 1 of a patch.  The complete
patch should abstract the rest of the ldap provider such that they do not
need to bind to -lldap in the first place.  If this is not the goal, I'd
argue that this ldap binding really wasn't appropriate in the first place.
[Of course, that's an argument for 2.0 sans ldap and not a solution for 1.3
next release ;-]  But I didn't want to hold up discussing a patch just to
add stubs to apr_ldap_err2string etc etc.

I also didn't hold up to add the parsing of LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc to find the

libraries (ldap, and dbd as well). That's something to discuss as well, and

again not a reason to hold up this patch.

Folks had hoped that httpd-2.2.9 would be compatible with either 1.2 or 1.3
apr flavors.  We can get closer by improving the config.m4 patches, e.g.

MOD_AUTHNZ_LDAP_LDADD="`$apu_config --ldap-libs`"

becomes

MOD_AUTHNZ_LDAP_LDADD="`$apu_config --ldap-libs`" \
    || MOD_AUTHNZ_LDAP_LDADD=""

meaning that when --ldap-libs is unrecognized, we surrender to the complete

libs exposed by apr-util-1.2.x. But this would only be a provisional change

for the lifespan of httpd-2.2.x until it absolutely requires 1.3.0.

This does create a hardship for ldap users of apr-util _ldap API, but with
consideration given to the many, many applications of apr-util which don't
utilize the _ldap API, this change seems very appropriate to me.  The note
about --ldap-libs can be prominently listed as the first entry in CHANGES.

Comments, feedback or questions?

Bill