Alex,
although I don't really aspire to become a AD committer, I'd like to
emphasize how important your observation is. I've been working with AD
for some time now, albeit very intermittendly.
My experience is that the learning curve is quite steep and the barrier
of entry somewhat high, due to the following two reasons:
o The lack of documentation. The AD documentation seems quite
fragmented. In places where there is documentation, it is rather good
(e.g. authentication), but in other places it is severely lacking. In
particular with respect to what I would call the "big picture" or
"strategy" and the core design. Therefore I'm looking forward to your
effort of creating educational material about this.
o This strategy, big picture or whatever you want to call it, is the
second problem area I see. The documentation and web site doesn't
clearly convey where AD wants to go. This may be due to the fact that it
doesn't want to go anywhere particular (i.e. live happily in the "base
technology" area). Still I think it is crucial to be able to ship a base
package which is useful in itself and is designed with a particular goal
in mind.
To give you an example of what I'm thinking of:
A few days ago I posted a question (without getting an answer) about
storing the partition configuration on the system partition. This has
clearly been part of the vision once
(ou=partitions,ou=configuration,ou=system), but has never been
implemented as far as I can see, and has never been documented as
missing. So, why did I ask this question? In order to be able to ship a
self-contained AD-SAR for JBoss, there has to be a way of configuring
it. Currently the configuration lives within the SAR which is quite
inconvenient, since I want the SAR to be a ZIP, not a directory. To
solve this, one could either invent a proprietary configuration format
(in contrast to the standard but inconvenient jboss-service.xml) and
place the configuration in JBoss's conf directory or go straight for
what I think would be the "nice" solution, i.e. store the configuration
in the system partition.
What I can do, is to offer some help in two specific areas: the DHCP
server and the SAR packaging:
o With respect to to the SAR packaging I already outlined a few problems
I see with its current state. I made some changes to it in order to make
it work at all, but I think that a lot more changes whould be necessary
in order to make in genuinely and generally useful.
o I have worked quite a bit on the DHCP server. The problem is that we
currently don't really need a full DHCP server in our yet, but just a
PXE proxy DHCP server. Nevertheless, a full implementation may be one of
our future goals and my code already contains quite a lot of what would
be needed for the full implementation.
Joerg Henne
