shared libraries for password backends

[Gerald Carter]

FOlks,

I'm brainstorming here a little and thought I would throw 
this one out.  In the past we have talked about using 
shared libraries for RPC functionality as a means of 
grouping functions and make smbd more extensible.

So I'm working on passdb/* stuff and I'm think "Whew!  There
are a lot of passdb compile options!"  Why not have a parameter
like

	passdb module path = /usr/local/samba/lib/tdbpasswd.so

or

	passdb module path = /usr/local/samba/lib/ldappasswd.so

and have these things loadable at run time?

This is a little easier way to start down this path since if
a platform does not support shared libraries, we can simply
disable the functionality at compile time and still use
smbpasswd as the default.  However, for those that do, this
gives us a chance to work on *.so issues before attacking 
the RPC libraries.  A good learning experience I think.
Anyone like or explictly hate this idea?

There was some work on this type of thing for OpenLDAP's 
db backend modules.  I'm going to follow up and see what happened
or is happening with that.






Cheers, jerry
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   /\  Gerald (Jerry) Carter                     Professional Services
 \/    http://www.valinux.com/  VA Linux Systems   gcarter at valinux.com
       http://www.samba.org/       SAMBA Team          jerry at samba.org
       http://www.plainjoe.org/                     jerry at plainjoe.org

       "...a hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
                                - Sting "Message in a Bottle" ( 1979 )