[glue-wg] Summary of changes in LDAP GLUE2 rendering as requested in last meeting

[stephen.burke at stfc.ac.uk]

Balazs Konya [mailto:balazs.konya at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Balazs
> Konya said:
> that is just glite. it is a single technology provider.
> yes, ARC at that time did not participate in the ldap discussion
> because we concentrated on the xml rendering.

Indeed. glite were at the time the only group interested in LDAP, so we made decisions, implemented them and deployed them. We now have three years of experience and we haven't encountered any major problems. As I've said several times, if ARC and Unicore really must have a different implementation there's nothing preventing you defining an alternative rendering.
 
> it seems to me like a clear lack of involvement from other technology
> providers

I don't see how that can be helped - if the other providers chose not to be involved that was their decision.
 
> You still did not explain my why it would not be possible to make
> changes in the
> glue2 ldap deployment in EGI. Let me know which GLUE2 consumer from EGI
> (operation) would be broken.

Maybe there's a basic misunderstanding about the reality of software deployment in EGI. If EMI were to release a new schema in EMI 3 it would likely be 2-3 years at least before all the 4000 or so services where it's currently deployed get updated - we started deploying the current implementation in 2009 and we're only now completing that. That means that changes can only be made in a backward-compatible way - anything new must be able to co-exist with the existing software in arbitrary combinations without breaking anything, and it will be a long time before you can rely on any new features.

  From an EGI perspective the implementation is finished and deployed and we have to make it work *now*, as it is. If there are imperfections we have to work around them. If people want to discuss changes to be made several years down the line that's fine, but it's a completely separate question.

Stephen