LDAP support removed in LO4 - Base documentation to be corrected ?

[iplaw67]

Hi all,

Just FYI, LDAP support for using a LDAP datasource has been removed from
LO4. I don't know whether there is a topic on this in the Base or Writer
guide, but it would probably be worth noting it down somewhere.

The reason for the removal is the fact that Thunderbird/Mozilla/Icedove
addressbook support is now done by the new Mork driver developed by
David Ostrovsky, instead of the mozilla addressbook code, except on
Windows (for some specific reason I can't remember right now). The
removal of the dependency on the very old and outdated Mozilla code
caused the removal of LDAP support, since the Mozilla code also handled
this side of things. Although for Linux there was also the Evolution
LDAP support which could be built in, this wasn't enabled in many Linux
distros.

LDAP support was never an option on OSX, LO was never compiled with that
in mind (much to my personal chagrin, having an OSX server with OpenLDAP
integration). I don't know whether there was any support for this on
Windows.

This will have an impact on corporate uses where LDAP is still used, and
note that OpenOffice.org supported it (albeit it with limited, read-only
functionality via the mozab code), and I believe that AOO continues to
offer this possibility.

For the moment, it doesn't seem that anyone on the dev team is
particularly keen to change the situation (i.e. bring back general LDAP
support), as the only present alternative would be to revert the code
changes made so far.

For me, as a corporate user/admin of my small heterogeneous workstation
pool, who was hoping to be able to see greater datasource availability
on OSX (the list is smaller than with Linux or Windows), this is a
fairly sizable step backwards, which I will have to somehow workaround,
or just switch to an alternative.

Anyway, I just thought that the Documentation team ought to know about
it, in case we have something somewhere that discusses such support as a
datasource.

BTW, the built-in help has now become obsolete. Also note that although
4.0rc contains the possibility of defining a LDAP addressbook
datasource, at least on Linux, the driver doesn't load.

Alex

[elderdanlewis]

This points to a question that needs to be answered. When OOo 2.0 came out, there was a text box with an icon for things that were new for 2.0. Should we have one for this situation? Removal of LDAP support is new for LO 4.0, and it is a rather important point. Or, perhaps this should be a Caution? A Note or Tip seem to be a poor choice.

--Dan

[iplaw67]

Good point, but I don't have any strong opinions either way on that, but yes, possibly a Caution. The same can be said of the dropping of StarOffice binary format support for the older binary formats, but I believe that this is mentioned already in the wiki.

Alex