Re: dropping back-ldbm (was: commit: ldap/servers/slapd connection.c)

[Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah@stanford.edu>]

--On Sunday, January 23, 2005 12:42 AM -0500 asr@ufl.edu wrote:

> ==> On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 16:19:17 -0800, Quanah Gibson-Mount
> <quanah@stanford.edu> said:
>
>
> > I suffered several years of an ldbm based directory.  The comfort your
> > customers feel is illusionary, and sadly like many things psychological,
> > it is all in their head. :P
>
> A facility broken in many ways I understand is often preferable to a
> facility broken in fewer ways, which I don't understand.  This ripples
> out to the customers of my services, etc.  This rapidly becomes a
> philosophical question requiring beer to settle properly: If users of my
> 2.6 million object LDBM database believe (in their head) that they're
> happy... :)
>
> Now, we're working on BDB; don't get me wrong.  But the comfort is real.

Well, I'll simply refer you to Howard's note about LDBM.  I will say that 
since moving to BDB on OL, I've not once had my directory service be 
unavailable, whatever other issues I may have run into.  I contrast that to 
several periods of time where I spent a week getting the LDBM directory 
back together after it happily propagated data errors from the master to 
every replica.

> > Third, how much time is spent just keeping LDBM working, when the real
> > future is in other backends?  It is like hiring someone to keep updating
> > a mainframe that can be used, but isn't, just in case you decide to use
> > it again.  It eats up time, and time is money, opensource software or
> > not.
>
> But this is a mainframe we -are- in fact using, every day.

Err, I think you missed my point.  People who *want* to use LDBM can stick 
with whatever the last release of OL was to support it.  LDBM is not being 
developed, feature wise.  It is simply being brought along, at whatever 
cost there is in complexity to keep it working in the current code 
framework.

> > Finally, none of this addresses the question as to when we evaluate
> > things  for retirement.
>
> Well, Kurt did that in parallel to this message.  Don't think I can
> improve on it.

Kurt's mail simply ducks the bullet.  Given the wonderful skills of the OL 
contributors, LDBM could be "maintained" for many years.  I don't see that 
as an argument for keeping it around.  The active development and addition 
of features is happening in the other, better, backends.  The commits to 
LDBM are to simply keep it functioning, and again, simply eat up the time 
of those skilled contributors that could be better spent elsewhere.

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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