With 2.4.21 out, and hopefully stable enough to promote to the next Stable release, it's time to feature-freeze 2.4 and prepare for the 2.5 branch. As I already announced to the OpenLDAP-Committers, we're also planning to switch from CVS to GIT in mid-January. Commits for 2.5 will begin after we've settled into GIT.

We haven't really laid out a formal roadmap for 2.5 yet, but I think most of it has been discussed here or in Development ITSs already.

I would like to be able to resolve all outstanding Development ITSs - we will either implement them or reject/close them. There are 42 outstanding at the moment.

Likewise for all outstanding ITSs in Software Bugs - many of them have been deferred because a proper fix would require invasive changes to large parts of the code base. There are 26 outstanding. With 2.5 beginning we are free to make these large scale changes.

We should also walk thru the Software Enhancement requests and decide which to accept and which to reject. Currently there are 37 outstanding.

I also have a number of specific areas I want to see worked on; some of these are included in the above ITSs but I'll outline them here:

syncrepl config - this is pretty unwieldy already; syncrepl needs to be moved outside of the slapd core and into an overlay. That will allow us a lot more flexibility in configuring while also eliminating a lot of redundant parsing code. suffixmassage - we at the very least need to be able to point a consumer at some non-homogeneous suffix in the provider. We may go for complete librewrite support as well, although at this point I don't see as strong a need.

config TLS certs and keys should be stored as LDAP attributes, not pointers to filesystem locations. This is a prereq to using some of the dynamic cert generation features of the CA overlay. (This can be troublesome as there may not be clean APIs for reading certs from memory in all of the TLS APIs we support.) Disabling individual config attribute values and entries. At the moment I'm thinking of adding an ";x-disabled" tag to those values.

back-mdb Using a single-level store for Entries will impact all of the schema engine as well. I think the simplest solution here is going to be using an mmap'd file for all of the schema elements. The actual design of back-mdb still needs to be defined in several areas. The single-level store approach exposes us to some new failure modes that the current multi-level backends don't have. (E.g., corruptions due to bad RAM / wild pointer writes are very likely to get persisted on disk, implicitly.) The solution I'm considering is based on a mirroring strategy. Every database will be stored twice on disk: once in the file that is actively mmap'd into the process, and once in a write-only file. On every intentional update of a memory page, we will also store a checksum of the page, and manually write the page to the mirror. If we detect a checksum failure on any in-memory page we can still retrieve a valid copy from the mirror file. This of course doubles our potential I/O load, but I don't believe it's any worse than the load from performing write-ahead logging on a traditional database. (And yes, mirroring will take the place of writing transaction log files.) Some of these same considerations apply to the schema storage, but not entirely. At runtime, the schema is effectively read-only. When we do dynamic schema changes thru cn=config, all other threads are suspended. For the mmap purposes, we can mark all of the schema pages as read-only during runtime, and only make them read-write when cn=config is actually trying to perform an update. As such, the only sticky issue is dealing with changes made to the back-config internal files by plain text editors and such.

These are the things I'm interested in. But as always, this Project is driven forward by the particular interests of each individual contributor. If you have other ideas you want to pursue, speak up.