Craig White wrote:
At that point, using OpenLDAP or CentOS-DS or Fedora-DS is more or less a matter of implementation details and utility. None of them are better than the other for most purposes and even things like the consoles in Fedora-DS aren't going to make it any easier for you to use LDAP if you don't understand how it works. In short, there really aren't decent shortcuts to using LDAP if you don't care to actually understand how and why it works.
I think the standards bodies have failed us badly on this front. People don't want to understand LDAP any more than they want to understand the bits in a TCP packet header. They just want systems to interoperate.
I agree, here. When I'm at work, and tasked with installing something that's new to me, or to all of us, I don't want to have to read a whole book; that's for after it's installed, and so I can tweak it. I expect, if it's released, and esp. if it's > version 1.0.0, to be able to simply install the rpm or tarfile; at most, ./configure, make, make install, and to find tools that will work in a manner that I'd expect from std. *Nix practice.
Even Spacewalk - and ya'll know how I feel about *that* - during the install, asks questions, so it can configure (at least partly) itself.
mark