[Kolab-devel] Horde preferences: LDAP or IMAP?

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi!

Any Kolab client provides user specific settings. Horde does to and
they are called "Preferences". A local client like Kontact will store
the user preferences locally in a file. The web client can't do this
but needs some other storage space.

Storage space on a Kolab server is always sparse: You either use
files, the LDAP database or the IMAP server. Files are usually being
used for system data and user specific data should end up in either
LDAP or IMAP.

Horde with Kolab traditionally uses the LDAP preferences driver in
order to store user settings. This is also why you have to install the
horde LDAP-schema when installing Horde.

I regard LDAP as a bad storage place for the web client preferences
and wrote a new preferences driver for Horde that uses an IMAP folder
to store the Horde preferences. Horde will call this Folder
"Preferences" but the main point is that it is being marked as special
folder type "kolab.h-prefs".

The advantages of this driver: The LDAP schemas don't have to be
modified and the users can be plain KolabInetOrgPerson objects. In
addition this reduces LDAP read/write operations.

The disadvantages: There is a new folder type and the other clients
might display a "Preferences"-Folder with mails they can't really use.

I have two questions:

1) Do people regard it as a desired alternative to store the
preferences on IMAP? Any specific drawbacks or advantages I missed?

2) If this driver should be available what should be the default
option?

The second question is important since we would need to ship the
driver with the earliest release possible. Otherwise we might get
people running this in production that will have to run "preferences
conversion scripts" (that would have to be written) if we ever change
the default option.

Thanks for comments!

Cheers,

Gunnar

-- 
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E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
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