There's been great and steady progress on getting closer to an official 2.5 release. At this time, I feel that 2.5 is ready for its first alpha. While there are some hard blockers to an official release that still need to be finished, there is plenty of items that are in the 2.5 tree that it would be good to get additional testing on now.

One thing that differentiates 2.5 from the time when 2.4 was released is that a substantial portion of the new code has already been being used in the Symas OpenLDAP Gold series which means it has already had extensive testing and production deployment.

For those interested in helping getting 2.5 an official release timeframe, the following things would be helpful:

*) I've been using Bugzilla's Target milestone to indicate items I'd like to see addressed for 2.5. This does not necessarily mean they will be fixed for 2.5. Many of the items are several years old, and simply need a confirmation as to whether they are still issues or were already fixed. It also may make more sense to push some of these items out to 2.6. I've done that for a number of issues already, so what remains are the ones where I felt I was not able to make that call. Anything I've added the keyword OL_2_5_REQUIRED to is something I think must be done for 2.5, but that's subject to review.

A list of issues currently marked as 2.5 (mostly minus doc bugs) can be seen here: https://bugs.openldap.org/buglist.cgi?component=backends&component=build&component=client%20tools&component=contrib&component=historical&component=libraries&component=overlays&component=slapd&list_id=834&product=OpenLDAP&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&target_milestone=2.5.0

*) There are about 40 explicit documentation bugs, as found here:

https://bugs.openldap.org/buglist.cgi?component=documentation&list_id=837&product=OpenLDAP&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&target_milestone=2.5.0

It would be great if community members who are familiar with the product could help chip in here, particularly with flushing out the Admin guide. For the man pages, we do have one item that really needs a policy decision that I can't make (ITS#7335), which is how we handle documenting options for slapd.conf vs cn=config. Right now, we are completely inconsistent in this and many relevant man pages are entirely missing anything about how to configure via cn=config. Once that policy is decided, it will unblock a lot of other work.

*) Testing -- We need a lot of this. It would be especially helpful if people who have QA/Test/Pre-prod environments were to run 2.5 through known work loads. To this end, Symas is planning on providing pre-compiled binaries for a number of platforms once there is an official alpha release. I still have a bit of work to do on that end, however, so it would not necessarily coincide with the source release. This may be something the LTB project could also participate in as a way to help testing of the 2.5 series.

To the above, it may be useful to go over the list of items that are new and changed with 2.5:

https://bugs.openldap.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&list_id=840&query_format=advanced&resolution=FIXED&resolution=PARTIAL&resolution=TEST&target_milestone=2.5.0

One area where it would be especially helpful for testing for the *BSD folks out there is the support added for kqueue. I'm hoping the FreeBSD project and similar will be able to participate in this.

Another area would be OpenSSL 3.0 testing, since it is nearing completion. It would be helpful if people could build and test the 2.5 branch against their current beta and see if they hit any new/odd issues and open issues on that accordingly if encountered.

Regards, Quanah

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Quanah Gibson-Mount Product Architect Symas Corporation Packaged, certified, and supported LDAP solutions powered by OpenLDAP: http://www.symas.com