[CentOS-devel] Website Version 2, next steps

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Ralph Angenendt
<ralph.angenendt at 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.