Hi Stephen,
This effort is partly dependent on the automount upstream providing
us
with an interface to plug into (currently, no such interface exists).
Automount in its present incarnation provides its own LDAP driver
internally. It does not actually use nss_ldap/nss-pam-ldapd; it just
[ab]uses their configuration files to prime its internal LDAP
functionality.
I know it. So I also know that there is not really any huge value in
implementing it. But still I have reasons for this:
1. Right now you need to define two configurations files for the same thing. Why? The real
reason for this is glibc limitation - it can not
handle automount maps so that automounter has to implement it on its own.
So for simplicity and transparency reasons we should still be aiming to include autofs in
the loop (keep it low priority, fine, but I
believe there should be an effort for it).
2. Right now the autofs ldap driver works fine, but not everything works the same. In
future we might include support for DNS sites to
autofs and once we do that, shall I open a next RFE to ask Ian Kent to include this
functionality in automounter, too? No, this is too messy.
3. If you fix some bug in the ldap code one can never know if autofs suffers from the same
or not
I believe you guys should really talk to Ian about this (he is a nice guy, he has included
lot of new functionality for me previously) and
agree on some strategy here. The current situation might be sufficient now, but is
unmaintainable long term.
Ondrej