On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 05:39:55PM -0600, Timo Sirainen wrote:
Just thought I'd mention that I probably won't be answering mails very actively this week while I'm in San Antonio (and I was kind of busy last week too). Hopefully I'll get back to answering/bugfixing next week..
I also started writing developers documentation to http://wiki.dovecot.org/Design. Comments welcome. Some things I had planned next:
- istream internals
- lib-storage API docs
- ..?
Hello Timo,
Just an idea talking about writing documentation :
When I looked at the authentication code (using LDAP) back in the 1.1 version, it took me some time to understand the function call cascading, especially with the "callback"/"context" mechanism which I found clever but hard to follow.
I came to the understanding (hope I was right) that you were using some kind of layered architecture, which went something like this :
"low level" < ldap_request level < passdb_ldap_request level < auth_request level < auth_request_handler level < auth_client_connection level < "high level"
where :
. passdb_ldap_request == passwd checking
. auth_request == parameters (user, password, state) and internal management of the request
. auth_request_handler == building of the answer of the request
. auth_client_connecion == sending to the authentication client (imap-login)...
. callback : a pointer in a lower level to a function in an higher level
. context : what links "objects" of those layers eachother
I was thinking that, if my understanding is correct, some overview from you of such an architecture would be of great help for those who want to understand the code.
Thanks.
-- Thomas Hummel | Institut Pasteur <hummel@pasteur.fr> | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau