Re: Proposed patch to support: draft-zeilenga-ldap-c-api-concurrency

[Doug Leavitt <doug.leavitt@oracle.com>]

On 08/18/10 06:34 PM, Howard Chu wrote:
> Kurt Zeilenga wrote:
> > Doug,
> >
> > I note as a general rule, which I will follow in this case, I don't 
> > review
> patches authors would like included in OpenLDAP Software until they 
> have been
> formally submitted for review.
>
> While the ITS submission provides for a review of what was done, my 
> purpose in directing the conversation here is to discuss why. It's not 
> clear to me that this old draft is still viable or desirable. As 

Our prime motivation for integrating operation safe enhancements
into OpenLDAP libldap is because we want to move off Mozilla libldap,
and specifically off an old Solaris version of Mozilla libldap that has
Solaris specific tweaks.  Our end goal is to deliver generic OpenLDAP
releases into Solaris, where the OpenLDAP libs/headers replace the
existing core Solaris libldap libs/headers and we deliver the same level
of compatibility as other distributions.

That said, Solaris naming services currently requires operation safe libldap
operations as part of our LDAP naming support.  We routinely multiplex
requests from multiple threads over a single connection, or a small
pool of connections using the known Mozilla libldap threading behaviors.

As I interpret draft-zeilenga-ldap-c-api-concurrency, the proposal 
introduces
the ldap_dup and ldap_destroy APIs that both enable the operation safe
enhancements we desire, and keep the existing OpenLDAP libldap behaviors
100% backwards compatible with previous releases.

So, I see the draft as a relevant and viable solution, that has already
been implemented once AFAIK (Novell), and provides a valuable feature
we (Solaris) strongly desire.  I believe that other applications that desire
to manage shared connections in a multi-threaded environment will
also want to use this functionality.

Doug.