[Debconf-devel] Bug#477531: Bug#477531: debconf: Patch to allow storing of templates in LDAP

[Davor Ocelic]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 05:05:27PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Davor Ocelic wrote:
> > Attached is a patch allowing Debconf to store and read templates
> > from a LDAP database.
> 
> Is there any chance of making this work with multilingual templates too?
> Is the issue mapping the names into ldap, or storing so much data in
> ldap?

The reasons for it not working out of the box (yet) are:

1) Fields like "Choices-zh_CN.GB2312" would currently not be properly
saved to LDAP. (Fix: trivial, improve one regex replacement).


2) You can't save say, "Choices-zh_CN.GB2312", to LDAP before that specific
attribute is defined and allowed in LDAP server's schema.

Current debconf.schema file has 9 attributes. Adding support for all
localizations of all fields would mean defining about 250 - 300 new
attributes (and the number will probably grow with time).

This is not a problem in itself, since internally in LDAP, attributes
do not take any space unless you actually fill in a value for them, but
browsing LDAP trees with a GUI browser becomes a bit unpleasant when you
have to scroll down 250 (mostly empty) attributes for each entry.
(There is ability in some ldap clients to hide empty attributes, though.)

I do plan to submit a multilingual patch at some later time, when I
think it over. In the meantime let's get basic functionality working well.

-doc