Future of LAT
For the last few months I’ve been unable to do much in the way of developing LAT.
The first issue is MonoDevelop. In the 1.3 branch, I started to make more use of MonoDevelop features. I switched from building the interface in Glade to MonoDevelop’s Stetic UI builder.
This made development much easier and I was able to clean up a lot of interface issues. However, I found new MonoDevelop releases wouldn’t compile the project any more. I reported the bug and some things got fixed but overall it stopped development cold.
As of MonoDevelop 0.15 I can’t even open the project anymore. It just crashes try to load the solution file. Even with the stable 1.2 branch, I can open the project but it refuses to compile with some strange errors.
The second issue is Mono, specifically the Novell.Directory.Ldap assembly. It doesn’t support non-Latin characters as far as I can tell. TLS support is broken. There is no support for GSSAPI for Kerberos intergration.
I can’t implement the features I want with the way things currently are. I guess I could try and fix it myself but it took me months to get one SSL bugfix accepted and then I had to wait for the next two Mono releases before I could use it. The TLS bug I reported has been open for over a year now. It doesn’t inspire confidence.
I’m not really interested in re-doing all the UI work in Glade and then switching back to a Gedit/Terminal/Glade workflow. Overall LAT does what I need it for and my itch is basically scratched. So as it stands, I don’t think I will be doing any more releases of LAT past 1.2.3 which I just pushed out today. If someone is interested in taking over the project, let me know.
Dear Bandiera,
thank you very much for your effords for creating the best ldap browser . I use your software as frontent for http://www.majen.net/smbldap installation. however this post made me sad, you suffer from glade/mono, why dont you use Sharpdevelop and Windows.Forms? new mono releases almost completely support windows.forms gui library. Indeed it is much more easier and cross-platform..
Thank you very much again..
PS: A copy of this message has been sent to your e-mail.
Monodevelop is VERY stable now at version 0.19 or 1.0 RC1 however you look at it. I had trouble around the same period, but it turned out that some of the problems were my fault. I had done some hacks to work around bugs in MonoDevelop and when they got fixed it really caused a problem.
Since you were not use Stetic version 0.15 from the start, you may have been bit by the same problem.
On another note, are you planning on continuing your support of OVAL? They are coming out with version 5.4 discussing 6.0 and you don’t have some 5.3 features like check_existence.
Cheerio!
Vlad