Jörg Henne a écrit :
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.
I think that it should be very clear : ADS want to be a LDAP server,
LdapV3 compliant, written in Java. This is it. Ok, there are other
targets, too, like being a good place to experiment X500 extensions,
etc, but first we must get this 1.0 release out ! We need to be rock
solid. We need to be simple to use.
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)
Yeah, sorry about it. I read it, get stuck with no answer, and, being
tired by trepidous work being on to finish performance tests for
ApacheCon EU, well, I forgot to answer something like : "Sorry, I don't
know, we will try to find out an answer, be patient". My bad...
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.
Any help is welcome !
We need energy, enthousiasm, and more committers :)
Emmanuel
