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

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Gunnar Wrobel <wrobel at pardus.de> writes:

> 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.

We will have to use the LDAP driver. I checked that kontact really
rewrites the special folder type so there exists no other option at
the moment.

Cheers,

Gunnar

-- 
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