I've had some discussions with Alex and Emmanuel and it's become
clear to me that I let a combination of my own frustrations and lack
of knowledge of the history here run away and lead me to making some
unfortunate statements.
IIUC the underlying situation here is that most of the apacheds
community has an informal criterion for code being in trunk and
released -- that more that one person can support the code. This
could be from several people working on it, general familiarity with
it, or through javadoc, documentation, and examples. Through some
historical accidents there is some code in the server that doesn't
really meet this criterion very well and there's some confusion about
what to do about it and how to keep the problem from getting worse.
I believe one step that has been taken is to suggest that new code
that may not immediately be OK be developed in a sandbox or branch
until enough people feel it can be well supported at which time it
can be moved into trunk. I think this is a great idea because it
provides a simple process solution to what was starting to appear to
be a personal clash. ("all defects are process defects") I think it
might be a good idea to have a "production ready sandbox" where
working code that needs documentation or review can sit and gain
documentation and comments until enough people agree that its
supportable. It might be advisable to move some code out of the
server to here.
I don't think there's been an overwhelming amount of discussion about
this process on the dev list so I'm hoping that if I'm right about
this process we'll hear more about it and that it will be documented
somewhere on the project web site. And if I jumped to yet more
unjustified conclusions I look forward to hearing about them as well :-)
thanks
david jencks
On Sep 22, 2007, at 11:14 PM, David Jencks wrote:
dunno alex. but this strikes me as a bit strange for you to be
criticizing Enrique for thinking about adding new features whereas
for the last month you were too busy adding new features to review
a pretty simple code cleanup patch.
I'm also a bit unclear exactly what you mean by "I'm just going to
say no for now". To me this looks like a proactive veto of code
that hasn't even been written yet, without a technical
justification. I don't quite see how that fits into normal apache
procedures. What am I missing?
I thought one of the ways to make an open source project flourish
was to encourage people to contribute what they want and can
contribute. I think that telling people their work is not welcome
is likely to keep the contributor base, well, extremely manageable.
Personally I think this is looks like a nice bit, not that i
understand any deep details about it, and if my voice meant
anything i'd encourage Enrique to work on it. If he wants to write
more docs than he already has on some other bits he's contributed
that would be fine with me too, but I usually find that docs are
wrong by the time they are actually written and available. I
generally find clear code is a better bet.
BTW, where are the developer and user guides for the dynamic schem
stuff? I'm probably just not looking in the right place but I
haven't been able to find the docs on how to use this feature.
And finally, what are
http://directory.apache.org/apacheds/1.5/dns-protocol-provider.html
http://directory.apache.org/apacheds/1.5/dns-protocol-
configuration.html
which I found in the advanced user guide table of contents?
I hope I'm not burning too many bridges with this email but I can't
say I have any desire to work on a project that features responses
like this to proposals for cool new stuff.
thanks
david jencks
On Sep 23, 2007, at 12:11 AM, Alex Karasulu wrote:
IMO if you have some time you might want to start work on some
developer documentation
on DNS as well as a user's guide so we can attract more committers
while answering user
questions around DNS.
Just this week someone asked about this on the users list and all
they heard were crickets.
Emmanuel had to sit there and tell the guy that we cannot support
him and its an embarrassment
for us. He had to apologize for your actions. That's not cool.
Although I want to see you make strides on adding new features to
Kerberos I think it's a bit irresponsible
for you to get back into new features without documenting others
that you added in the past.
You just can't do that while you leave the DNS situation in a poor
state. Do you understand
the point I'm trying to make here? Do you see some merit in what
I am saying from a community
perspective? I'm trying to get you to understand where we're
coming from and not think this is
at all any means to lessen your value. We really like the
technical things you do but a community
is not just about the code.
It's antithetical to OS culture to just drop code or features into
some project and leave. You have
to take care of the users, the developers that come after you so
the project is alive rather than being
an inanimate piece of code. By suggesting this new feature
addition before taking care of your
inherent responsibilities to the community clearly shows that
you're not thinking about these aspects.
This is why I'm going to just say no for now.
Secondly with respect to technical matters how does this impact
what we have in Triplesec
with HOTP? Is this another SAM type for the kerberos server which
uses the class loading
scheme we already have in place for verifiers?
Alex
On 9/22/07, Enrique Rodriguez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi, Directory developers,
I have a window with no major deadlines for the next few weeks, so I
looked into adding 1 new Kerberos feature for the next release.
After
doing some "due diligence," ie reading the relevant specs and
reviewing what support I need from the JDK and various libraries,
I am
highly confident I can add PKINIT support for 1.5.2.
PKINIT is a pre-authentication type for Kerberos (detailed in RFC
4556). For those not familiar, PKINIT can be quickly summarized as
"smartcard authentication for Kerberos, replacing the
username/password." PKINIT can also work with a local keypair, so
there isn't a requirement for hardware like an actual smartcard,
though that is the intended deployment scenario.
Since this is only a new pre-authentication verifier, I would rather
not branch and instead develop this, at first, in my sandbox. I have
time starting this weekend, so I'd like to start to get code
committed, to back the code up.
Enrique
