Re: (ITS#5134) dbconfig vs. DB_CONFIG

[hyc@symas.com]

Raphaël Ouazana-Sustowski wrote:
> Le Jeu 13 septembre 2007 22:40, Howard Chu a écrit :
>> Raphaël Ouazana-Sustowski wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Le Jeu 13 septembre 2007 21:29, hyc@symas.com a écrit :
>>>> There is nothing ambiguous here. When slapd.conf is being used, the
>>>> dbconfig
>>>> directive *only* takes effect *if* no DB_CONFIG file exists. If one
>>>> exists, the
>>>> dbconfig directives are ignored.
>>> So if someone first create its DB_CONFIG by putting dbconfig directives
>>> in
>>> slapd.conf, and then modify these directives, the modification has no
>>> effect ?
>> Correct.
>>
>>> Reading the man page, I thought that the directives don't modify
>>> DB_CONFIG, but were applied at slapd's startup.
>> For slapd.conf, the directives can only take effect after they are written
>> to
>> DB_CONFIG. They will only be written to DB_CONFIG at startup time, and
>> only if
>> no such file already existed.
>>
>> The main reason this directive was added was for the benefit of cn=config.
>> Using it in slapd.conf is rather pointless. Once you start managing slapd
>> through cn=config, you are expected to stop editing DB_CONFIG manually.
> 
> Thank you very much for the clarification.
> 
> Just for the records, it seems that Debian packages (and maybe others) use
> dbconfig directives without warning users that they should not modify
> these parameters here...

Thanks for that bit of information, I was not aware of that. For the record, 
Debian packagers have never asked us whether what they're doing makes any bit 
of sense. I believe it is the packager's responsibility to proactively check 
these things out; certainly we (OpenLDAP Project) cannot go out and poll every 
packager.
-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/