Re: nss_ldap and openldap importing

Brooks Davis wrote:

> My life would be a heck of a lot simpler if LDAP support were included
> in the base. 

My life would be a lot easier if a lot of things were included in the base,
but I don't think that's a good argument for including them. :)

> At the moment I'm using NIS in several situations where
> it just doesn't cut it any more.  IMO we need (as a minimum) a modern
> network directory service client in the base.  While a majority of
> FreeBSD users may not need LDAP in the base, I would suspect that a
> majority of machines would benefit from it. 

IMO, this argument isn't persuasive. My personal feeling is that before
something new gets added to the base system it needs to have a pretty large
userbase, perhaps even a majority of our users. We have a very good ports
system that exists to provide easy access to "optional" software that isn't
needed by a majority of our users. I haven't seen any reasons why ldap
support doesn't fall into that category.

> A much greater portion of
> machines would probably benefit from and LDAP client then benefit from a
> number of the servers in the base system such as BIND (not a criticism
> of having BIND in the base).

I'm really getting tired of BIND being used as the canonical example here.
As I've said many times:

1. I would gladly remove BIND from the base, except
2. A large number of users spoke up and said they like having the tools
(like dig, host, nslookup) in the base, and
3. If we're going to have that stuff, it's just as easy to have all the
sources, which is why
4. I added all those knobs to disable building bits that people don't want.

The offer still stands to flip the defaults for things like named if people
really don't want to have that server in the base by default.

However, I object to this example on another, perhaps more substantive
ground. Namely that we're not talking about justifying something that is
already in the base, we're talking about justifying adding something to it.
As I said, in my opinion the bar for that should be really high. I'd like to
see more things stripped out of the base, not added to it.

Doug

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