[wpkg-users] WPKG and LDAP based hosts list

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Dehennin wrote:
> Tomasz Chmielewski <mangoo at wpkg.org> writes:
> 
>> To store anything in LDAP, you'd need to create a proper .schema for WPKG 
>> entries. Which would be one more thing to learn.
> 
> Yes, I know, I'm quite confident with LDAP ;-). The only things I
> don't know is about JScript as my preferred language is Perl ;-)

Then I have another idea which might work. Why not writing a perl tool 
which is querying LDAP and creating hosts.xml? Currently WPKG already 
supports reading the XML files from a web URL. Right, at the moment it's 
not supporting a mixed setup - but this might be changed easily (I even 
thought about it).

I am proposing this as the interface within WPKG to read files from a 
web service is very flexible. Instead of having WPKG supporting every 
possible system in the world which _could_ theoretically support storing 
of WPKG definitions it might be easier to write a web-service for each 
of this systems.
Such a Perl server (or CGI script for Apache...) could be added to the 
tools for everybody who likes to use LDAP.

I also see that introducing LDAP to WPKG brings not only more complexity 
but also more effort for support. People will ask for it how to use it - 
even if they are not using it finally. Having a separate add-on which is 
able to generate the XML files to be fetched by WPKG is entirely fine 
and flexible.

So I would be happy if you could write such an implementation rather 
than having to increase the complexity of WPKG.
I can then propose an enhancement so that the location for all files can 
be specified independently.

I think this way we are much more flexible - and probably it even 
encourages other people to write different services (for MySQL like 
WPKG_WEB, for binary storage, active directory lookup or any other 
system). The interface would always be the same: The service creates 
valid WPKG XML files to be fetched via HTTP protocol.

Let's have WPKG concentrate on the job it was designed for: Software 
deployment. And not having WPKG extended to an operating system...

br,
Rainer