[dev] Shares and multiple storage backends

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi!

I have been working on extending the Horde share driver to work
together with Kolab (http://www.kolab.org) shares. Basically Kolab
uses IMAP folders as shared storage objects. Most of the functionality
provided by the original DataTree-based share driver can be mapped to
an IMAP server based system without problems. But I did hit an impasse
now and would be happy if I could get some feedback.

The DataTree share driver is able to handle shares for different
storage back ends simultaneously. For example you could activate an
SQL-based and an LDAP-based source for addresses within Turba and let
the DataTree share handler handle shares across both sources at the
same time. This is something the Kolab driver is currently not able to
handle since the list of available shares is strongly linked to the
actual storage backend (IMAP in the case of Kolab).

Now I considered the possibility of extending the Kolab share driver
so that it provides the necessary capabilities to support shares for
multiple storage back ends. This would be possible but I assume that
it would result in an awkward hack and would only have very few use
cases.

Then I did take a closer look at Ingo (following Chucks hints in
http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/?id=5117) and realized that the DataTree
driver seems to have its own problems with regard to handling shares
over different storage back ends.

The DataTree driver may declare shares that simply won't work if the
storage back end does not allow users to see/edit the data of other
users.  This is the case if you use LDAP as a storage back end. The
LDAP permissions will have to allow users shared access to data and
that is something the DataTree driver cannot influence even if you
declare the shares within the driver.

So my resulting question would be if the handling of shares should not
rather be linked to specific storage drivers instead of having one
global share configuration that allows you to choose only one driver
for all storage backends at the same time?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

Gunnar


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