Re: loadable module support

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

I'm quite interested in this (and other proposals for dynamic
loading of modules).  However, it's best we move any discussion
concerning this to our developer's mailing list (openldap-devel).

I await your posting to devel before making any specific comments.
	Kurt

At 05:57 PM 4/12/99 +0200, Bastiaan Bakker wrote:
>Hi ,
>
>I'm currently writing a new backend to LDAP-enable the userdatabase
>server in use at Lifeline. For development speed and flexibilty I
>thought it would be nice if OpenLDAP supports dynamically loadable
>modules, like Apache has. This way one could simply enable specific
>backends, authentication methods or features (e.g. phonetic) in the
>config file.
>Currently I've a small patch that allows a line in slapd.conf like:
>
>loadmodule    /opt/ldap/modules/backcorba.so
>
>This will load any shared object regardless of its function. It's up to
>the module to register itself upon initialization. So far I've only
>patched backend.c and some backends to allow for dynamic backend
>loading. The ugly if-then list in new_backend() is replaced by a lookup
>in a hashtable. This yields a pointer to a function that will set the
>appropiate hooks in the Backend structure. The init method of the
>backend modules adds the entry to the hashtable. I haven't included
>support for other modules yet. First I would like to receive some
>feedback on my approach. Specifically my patches require glib/gmodule
>for the loadable module support and the hashtable. In my opinion glib (a
>independently maintained spinoff of GTK/GNOME) is a great library for
>doing stuff like this in a platform independent way. Secondly, I'm no
>autoconf guru, so I anyone would like to help me incorporate the
>required changes in the build configuration (for example
>conditiotionally include -rdynamic in the CFLAGS), that would be
>appreciated very much. It's my intentiation to leave the loadable module
>support completely optional (switchale with ./configure).
>Please let me know what you think!
>
>Regards,
>
>Bastiaan Bakker
>
>
>
>
>Attachment Converted: "c:\home\kurt\data files\eudora\attach\vcard.vcf"
>