Password sync plugin, and questions about plugin criticality

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Tuesday, June 27, 2006 01:11:07 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams 
<Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 02:08:29PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
>> Our goal is that in the normal case you need only drop a plugin into a
>> directory in order to enable it.  You should not have to configure any
>> more than that.  We will probably support a mechanism long-term for
>> overriding order.
>
> If you'd provide such a mechanism then you might as well do that from
> the start.
>
> Configuration by hard/symlink is probably a bad idea for some of us.

I agree.  Software that scans some directory and loads all the plugins it 
finds causes problems.  Sometimes you want to disable a plugin, or run 
multiple instances of a program with different sets of plugins, or have 
multiple versions of plugins installed simultaneously to facilitate a 
transition.

Also, the plugins themselves are software, not configuration.  Some of us 
have operational practices that require keeping software and configuration 
in different places, and packages that force us to combine them cause no 
end of headaches.  I imagine that as an operating system vendor who ships 
Kerberos, Nico is in precisely that situation.

-- Jeff