

Re: PATCH: back-sock

Brian Candler wrote:
P.S. Aside: it struck me after originally writing this code that if you're
going to use openldap in this way, all that it is doing is acting as an ASN1
to back-shell protocol converter. In that case, your backend script might as
well just talk ASN1 instead of back-shell. I even went as far as
implementing this - but in Ruby, as it would be far too painful in Perl.
Yes, that was my initial reaction to seeing your description. I.e., you must write your external module to be a relatively complete LDAP server that speaks LDIF instead of ASN.1. It strikes me that this isn't necessarily the most wonderful thing to do.

To me the notions of "externally scripted module" and "production use" are mutually incompatible. You use a scripting backend to prototype an interaction, and if it needs to perform well in production use you rewrite it in C. The reason I find back-perl interesting is because I can change its code on the fly, with very little up-front effort, which makes it easy to test ideas rapidly. If I need to write a listener and various other server infrastructure before being able to do any useful work, the costs go up and I might as well just write an overlay on top of back-null. Indeed, with the overlay mechanism I haven't felt the need to use back-perl in a very very long time.

 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
 Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 OpenLDAP Core Team            http://www.openldap.org/project/