On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Ralph Angenendt ralph.angenendt@gmail.com wrote:
- Glue
At the moment we have different user databases for everything except website and forums. This has to change. As far as we've found out, every piece of software we use at the moment can be coaxed to authenticate against an LDAP database. We want to order those accounts by email (make that the primary key, as it has to be unique) and try to merge them into one large database. Logging in will still be done on username / password or on the wiki with WikiName / password, where your WikiName will be one of the attributes your account has in the LDAP backend.
Dear Lord, yes, that makes sense.
This has some issues: We will invariably have lots of doubled accounts, as people might have subscribed to the website with a different mail address than to the wiki. We will need to weed out spammer acocunts, something which probably will not be easy.
Also, people like me might say something different from a work email account than from a personal account.
I worry about using the email address as the key, because it makes it very difficult to *preserve* a user's history across address changes. I like my GMail account, but I've had old Comcast or university accounts from which I submitted bugs to RHEL years ago. If I'm not mistaken, index management by numerical keys can often be significantly faster than by text keys.