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LDAP support

From: Howard Chu <hyc_at_highlandsun.com>
Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 06:05:35 -0700

Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Sun, 2 May 2010, Howard Chu wrote:
>> It wouldn't take me much effort to restructure it to be slightly more
>> multi-friendly. Could at least break apart the result parsing loop. With a
>> recent OpenLDAP library we could even delegate all of the connection setup
>> to curl, and use its SSL setup instead of ours. (But I'll save that for
>> another email thread, if it's worth pursuing.)
>
> That does sound like some great ways to improve the LDAP sitation!
>
> I'm not sure what we should use as metric to know if its worth it or not. I
> would assume that current libcurl-LDAP is used only by a few rare users, but
> quite possibly it might be used by more if it was converted to become a
> protocol more in the same style and support-level as the others. But how can
> we tell? It would be great if LDAP users on the list reading this would speak
> up and let us know!

... dead silence ...

> Also, I think our current LDAP sitation also reflects the somewhat low
> priority the protocol has had among us libcurl developers.

Looking at the code, it appears that libcurl always connects to the target
server before dropping into any URL handler code. And this LDAP module totally
ignores that, and does its own ldap_init which creates another connection. So
every use of LDAP creates a redundant socket / connection. Am I right?

I wonder if the NOVELL_LDAPSDK support is worthwhile any more. Novell has been
shipping a repackaged OpenLDAP client library for several years now.

-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/
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Received on 2010-05-07