Dan Pritts wrote:
On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 04:38:32PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:Out of fairness want to note that the most significant component of the problems with the OpenLDAP packages for Debian (and Ubuntu, to a somewhat lesser degree) is that the packaging team has basically no resources.Interesting about the Debian situation. Another reminder to me of why I don't use Debian; the project's concerns about absolute "freedom" don't mesh with my concerns about getting real work done. That said, I've seen similar "don't use the distro's package" notes about other distributions here, too. I'm a redhat user. Of course, I should complain to redhat rather than here, but I only pay them the .edu rate for software updates with no support. I don't know the history of the particular (ancient at this point) version of openldap that RHEL5 includes, or what redhat has done behind the scenes to fix problems, but i have to say that in general their policy of stability makes running servers a lot easier. Of course, redhat has its own ldap server, which might explain why they neglect their openldap packages.
RedHat's neglect goes back long before they bought Netscape. Anyone holding up their historical practice as a model of good open source behavior needs to look again. At least the Debian people are keeping in regular contact on these mailing lists now. When sticky questions come up, at least we have an established channel of communication with them. I think some RedHat folks have been doing better on the communication front recently, and I'm glad to see it. But it's still pretty minimal in comparison to other teams.
Again though, I recognize that I get from openldap much more than I have paid to the project. Thanks for all your hard work developing the software. I suppose if it were super easy to make everything work, they wouldn't need me here and I'd be flipping burgers. :)
Ultimately I'd like the software to work so perfectly that we don't need to provide support any more, and then I'll just spend my time playing fiddle.
For some level of users, we're already there - plenty of people use it without needing any help.
-- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/