Christian Haugan Toldnes christian.toldnes@ntnu.no writes:
I do have to wonder though; does this mean that it's commonly known in the LDAP community that distributiors are notoriously bad at maintaining LDAP server packages in general, as opposed to other software? Or do you consider this advice to be general to all server software, in which case I would have to disagree.. :)
The pace of change of the OpenLDAP server is considerably faster than any distribution could hope to track in a stable release, and even faster than many unstable distributions can track if they do any significant QA on the packages and don't have a lot of manpower.
The clients and client libraries are much more stable and don't change nearly as fast as the server.
The server that comes with a distribution, particularly a stable release, is therefore always going to be significantly out of date, and is best thought of as a reasonable solution for limited purposes that involve no new features, no special perfomance requirements, and no behavior that's likely to trigger any rarely-used code paths or bugs. As soon as you start talking about advanced features like multi-master replication, or significant performance requirements, you're going to want to be running the fast-changing current code.