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Re: documentation updates (Was: sample DB_CONFIG bdb backend docs : a must in faq-o-matic)



--On Monday, June 07, 2004 9:37 AM -0700 "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org> wrote:

Let me clarify a few things.

1) the source for the AG is available in CVS, see:
        http://www.openldap.org/software/repo.html
        http://www.openldap.org/devel/cvsweb.cgi

2) changes to the AG are be submitted and treated same
   as changes to code, see:
        http://www.openldap.org/devel/contributing.html

3) FAQ is independent of the AG, changes to it are submitted
   directly to it.  The FAQ is often used as a breeding ground
   for future AG submissions, but the FAQ itself is NOT a
   AG submission mechanism (nor is a prior FAQ submission
   required to make a AG submission).

And if you or others feel that the webpages don't reflect this,
please feel free to submit changes to webpages.  This should
be done through the ITS system as well.  Source for the webpages
is actually in CVS as well, but this is not documented.  So,
normally, changes to webpages are submitted in a descriptive
form.

My 2c on this is that the need addressed by web pages is often beyond the 'scope' of the OL Administrator's guide. In addition to configuring OpenLDAP, for example, I have information on building OpenSSL, Cyrus-SASL, Heimdal, etc. Generally when those types of questions are sent to the OL list, the people making the inquiry are told to go and ask the related list. Having a 'single source' of this documentation can be a lot more useful than looking at 5 or 6 different products trying to glean the information necessary from them to get a working system going.

I also caveat my documentation to explicitly note that it is what Stanford needs to do for its environment, and that the steps detailed may not meet the needs that others have. I think that is also a very important point. OpenLDAP itself has a ton of features and options available to it, and how a person wants to configure and operate OpenLDAP is going to depend entirely on their needs. I think it would be extremely difficult to make the AG or FAQ-O-Matic address each and every environment need that is out there.

--Quanah


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