DHCP LDAP patch and 3.1.0?

[David W. Hankins]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 11:28:08AM -0400, Brian Masney wrote:
>     I wrote a patch[1] a few years ago that adds LDAP functionality to the DHCP
> server. I still maintain it but I haven't added any new features to it. The
> patch is mostly self contained and it only makes a few minor changes to the
> core DHCP server. Do you think it is possible to include this patch in the
> 3.1.0 release? The overall response to the patch has been very positiive.

I honestly wanted to (and I also wanted to supply some other
'database' replacements for dhcpd.leases, so unfortunately I
delayed your patch until I could look at all of them at once...in
hindsight, integrating it would have been more useful to us right
now), but I don't think we have enough cycles left for 3.1.0 for
something as large as this.

In order to integrate a patch we're required to do a line-by-line
review of the sources.  Judging by the size of the patch, that
would take at least 48 hours we don't have, substantially longer
if I fail to resist the urge to make changes (there's always
something...).

But this is still definitely something we want to do, and we will
try and get another feature release on a slightly more advanced
schedule than normal (normal for ISC's other packages, not for ISC
DHCP) after the DHCPv6 software is out the door.

But also honestly there are some other features that are of slightly
higher critical importance to the 'direction' of the ISC DHCP software
package - take asynchronous ddns updates for example.  The lack of
this feature is crippling for any large scale installation, more so
I dare say than database back ends.  The freebsd /usr/ports patches
and any linux distribution that packages our software also applies
a set of security patches - chroot and setuid.  That versus LDAP?
No offense meant, but no contest.  I've no time left to me for these
either.

I'm having to cut 3.1.0 loose without addressing these and
others like it.  So even I am feeling this crunch...features
I've written or been keen to have are staying on their development
branches too.

3.1.0 is what we've got, and all we've got.  We'll do more in the
next round.

The closer we get to a 3.1.0a1 tarball, the happier I am with that
actually.  3.1.0 would have been a massive set of changes considering
how long it's been since the last feature release and how many
patches from submitters we've queued up in that time.

If we can put out a larger number of smaller feature releases,
that might actually help the process.

-- 
David W. Hankins	"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer		you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.	-- Jack T. Hankins