On April 13, 1999 at 23:59, Nathan Bailey wrote:
> The more elegant solution would seem to be to tie it in to the
> aliases code, so you got something like:
> if it's an alias, use real address
> if it's a local address, deliver locally
> if it's not found, look up the directory/directories
>
> I'm not sure which order the last two should be in, actually. And you
> certainly want to have multiple directory support, at least until there
> is a worldwide directory hiearchy (like DNS).
I agree that LDAP support should be an extension of the alias mechanism
(if possible), and it should compliment the flat file method current
used to define aliases. Therefore, if a user specifies LDAP lookup
(via command-line options or some other method), alias resolution
should work as follows:
1. Look in Aliasfile
2. Query directory servers
3. If nothing found, leave "as-is".
(You could have something like nsswitch.conf if specifying resolution
lookup order is needed.)
The challenge with supporting LDAP is to make nmh flexible enough
to deal with variant, and custom, schemas for storing user information.
Custom query support could be done by specifying LDAP URL queries
that are something like the following:
ldap://ldap.foo.com/o=foo,c=US?emailaddress?sub?(emailalias=%s)
where "%s" gets replaced with the string entered in an address field,
or specified as an argument to ali (note, I'm not sure if I got the URL
syntax right, but it conveys the idea).
Other issues:
o Should there be support for LDAP authentication or should
it all be anonymous?
o Should some default schemas be supported? Example, Netscape's
address book supports lookups on Internet-wide directory
servers like Four11, InfoSpace, etc.
o How will LDAP-related options be specified? Extension to
mh-profiles? What about mts-tailor settings?
o How should nmh behave when multiple entries are matched for
a given query? Prompt user for choice? Just report ambiguity?
I'm sure there are other issues.
--ewh
----
Earl Hood | University of California: Irvine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Electronic Loiterer
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/ | Dabbler of SGML/WWW/Perl/MIME
