Re: Gosa vs. CipUX
Hi,
On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 03:48:12PM +0100, Andreas B. Mundt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 01:01:57PM +0100, Mike Gabriel wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I want to grab one issue from the current NFS4+Krb5 thread that concerns me...
> >
> > In Germany there is quite an initiative around CipUX and Skolelinux
> > going on. Now I read about Gosa being (probably) used for user and
> > site management. Both systems probably have their pros and cons, but
> > somehow they feel mutually exclusive to me. But maybe I am wrong at
> > this point...
> >
> > Could someone just in short point out the current (and hopefully
> > common) strategy around user and site management? Wiki-Links will of
> > course suffice, if there are any...
> >
>
> Unfortunatelly, I think there is no common strategy. To keep a long
> story short: After the Lenny release, it had to be decided which
> administration tool might be the 'best' to be chosen for squeeze.
>
> Candidates were LWAT used in lenny, unmaintained and with dead
> upstream, GOsa, with upstream activities and support, but not
> especially targeted for schools, and finally CipUX. As the CipUX
> people seem to see no chance to integrate their work for reasons they
> can tell you better, nobody active in the international project worked
> on the integration of CipUX. (This is a rather critical point, and it
> seems there are a lot personal feelings and the like involved ...).
Sorry for potentially making this discussion longer than it should be...
Would you please explain to me, again, what "the CipUX people" have to
do, or failed to do, in order to get their working packages integrated
into Skolelinux? I think "the CipUX poeple" really _want_ to have their
stuff integrated into Skolelinux, but apparently don't know how the
magic is going to happen.
Most of CipUX is already packaged by Jonas Smedegaard in Debian. We are
using CipUX in our school installations for 3 years now, in the
Skolelinux-RLP project. We are also using a modified version of italc
that features add-ons like user notification and examination mode for
german schools, which is using CipUX as middleware for internet access
management controlled by the teacher. If CipUX does not make it into
Skolelinux for Squeeze, we will probably have to change that to become
script-based LDAP handling, just to be on the safe side and not relying
on a specific LDAP tool.
Maybe it's just me, but I fail to see a technical problem on the side of
"the CipUX people". This has already been discussed, but with no
apparent result that explains to me why CipUX is out of question (or I
just missed it?).
> So I started to give GOsa a try. One of the main reasons for me was
> the use of available software and the idea that a project with limited
> manpower should focus its coding activities on stuff that's special to
> the goals (school specific stuff) and not already solved elsewhere
> (general system- and user-administration). Further more, I hoped to use
> features like FAI which allows more flexibility for schools which want
> to customize their setup individually at a later stage.
>
> In the meantime, I changed my view a bit. It looks like GOsa is only
> seen as a temporary solution by a majority of the project. (Of course,
> taking this attitude leads to a limping integration, nobody is interested in
> polishing and improving the setup, it's perhaps even kind of spoiled by
> demanding 'compatibility with other solutions', which in turn leads to
> the fact that everybody handles it like something you don't like but
> can't get rid of (yet)).
>
> So if you ask me, I think as long as I am the only one supporting
> GOsa, it will go away as soon as there is a working alternative
> available.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this. So, it is probably not a
good idea for us to either put any effort into GOsa integration of our
tools, since it is "temporary", right?
Regards
-Klaus
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