Hi, On Montag, 8. März 2010, Andreas B. Mundt wrote: > I would like to mention and stress the importance of a graphical user > interface to ldap as essential and very important component of the > DebianEdu/Skolelinux distribution. Thank you for bringing this up now! (It's nothing new, but I hope we will have some real progress on this topic eventually :-) > In my impression this component > seems to be rather disregarded at the moment. Yeah :( > Currently we provide lwat as very simple but also very limited > GU-interface to ldap. The last upload to Debian happened almost two > years ago on 2008-03-28, and upstream (in)activity is comparable. A > lot of wishlist bugs have been filed, patches almost trivially to > include are in the Debian BTS since ages. To me, it seems as if there > are no resources left to ensure a minimum of maintenance, not to talk > about further development and general improvements. Yes, but AFAIK someone could just pick it up and continue development. And not to be forgotten, John has done this last year, though he couldnt address all concerns. But he addressed a few. I think improving lwat might be a feasable short term solution (ie for squeeze), but this needs a (doable) list of what's missing. > I consider the administration of the ldap tree as core component of > our system. Me too. But it has to be technically sound (too), which so far, noone could deliver. > If I look at the lwat login screen now, > it welcomes me with typos in the text and a copyright notice from > 2007; all in all not very encouraging. File bugs, send patches? > I think we need either to reactivate development and maintenance of > lwat and manage to ensure this in the long term, or we need to > find alternatives, evaluate these and decide to support a solution > with active and reliable upstream. I think we should do both. > Without any further analysis I > heard about gosa, CipUX, perhaps webmin can be repackaged [1] or > phpLDAPadmin extended, ... no idea. I think gosa and cipux might be realistic alternatives for lenny even. For cipux I'd like to know what Jonas (the Debian maintainer) thinks about its readyness for squeeze and for gosa I believe it would "only" need to work of glueing it together. Gosa is already in squeeze and is activly maintained, the only problem I know of is the need for an extra gosa server... (due to it's security architecture). As far as I remember webmins codebase is still not suited for Debian (quality wise), even though it is activly being developed. Last I looked was a year ago or so, but loooong after its removal :) > However, it should be clear that we will have no chance to be > competitive if we do not care. Yes. cheers, Holger
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