On Thursday, 18 March 2010 20:10:32 Howard Chu wrote:
As it should be. If you're running a package from a distro vendor, then you should be consuming their support resources, not ours. We don't know what all the distro packagers do, what options they use, what libraries they include. Some of them ship explicitly broken packages, despite our best efforts. (E.g., RedHat/CentOS, linking against Berkeley DB 4.3 when we know for a fact that this combination crashes, and have explicitly prevented using BDB 4.3 in our configure script.)
Let's be careful about what we criticise some of the better open source companies of doing. While the Red Hat packages have historically left a *lot* to be desired (Red Hat 7.x/RHEL2.1 shipped OpenLDAP 2.0.x built against GNU gdbm!, RHEL3 shipped 2.0.x when 2.1 had been stable for a substantial amount of time), the RHEL4 packages of 2.2 built an internal copy of 4.2:
$ rpm -qlp /data/software/linux/redhat/rhel4es-64/RedHat/RPMS/openldap- servers-2.2.13-12.el4.x86_64.rpm |grep "lib.*db" /usr/lib64/libslapd_db-4.2.so /usr/lib64/tls/libslapd_db-4.2.so
and RHEL5 shipped 2.3 (granted, RHEL5.2 and earlier had a very old version, 2.3.27 I think) built with an internal copy of 4.4 (while the "system" copy of db was 4.3):
$ rpm -qlp /data/software/linux/redhat/rhel5.1-64/Server/openldap- servers-2.3.27-8.x86_64.rpm |grep "lib.*db" /usr/lib64/libslapd_db-4.4.so /usr/lib64/tls/libslapd_db-4.4.so
While Fedora may have shipped OpenLDAP built against db4.3, I can find no evidence of Red Hat having shipped that combination in any RHEL release.
As of 5.3, the OpenLDAP packages shipped by Red Hat are quite adequate (IMHO), even if there are some peculiarities and areas for improvement. In environments which don't justify 2.4, or where OpenLDAP isn't business- critical (where I still have RHEL4 boxes running 2.3.43 because I can't justify an OS upgrade yet), CentOS 5.3 with the supplied packages is quite adequate.
Of course, people who desire packages for 2.4 can get them from others, and people can argue the point that Red Hat should provide them. However Red Hat aims to provide some kind of stability, including version stability. And, in the same was as their OpenLDAP packages are still on 2.3, their samba packages (at least on RHEL 5.4) are still on 3.0 (when there is even *more* motivation to ship a newer version, due to compatibility with the new versions of the desktop software with the biggest market share).
If you have a requirement for 2.4, faced with the choices, I would *not* go with a distro that ships OpenLDAP built against gnutls, so my personal choices would be Mandriva or CentOS with my 2.4 packages (but, I could be biased).
Regards, Buchan