Shibboleth Developers

[Nate Klingenstein <>]

All,

A resource I don't think we've used sufficiently in making decisions 
about the deployment and packaging of Shibboleth is the community that 
has developed over the last few months.  Steven and I agreed on a 
recent call that there's a lot of knowledge and opinion out there that 
could be valuable to inform choices about packaging.  There are several 
things I'd like to ask them about:

1)  Would you find shell scripts or other simple GUI options for common 
configuration tasks useful, or is it better to learn hands-on 
manipulation of the XML file?

2)  One of the things we've proposed on the development team is the 
creation of a tarball and a set of shell scripts which would 
essentially generate an entire functional canned deployment, including 
configuration, Tomcat, and other components.  Would this be useful, 
bearing in mind it would not be viable for many production deployments, 
but would allow for a very simple hands-on experience with Shibboleth?

3)  Would it be useful to continue to pursue the locahost test 
environment, where a Shibboleth target and a Shibboleth origin are 
deployed on the same box and told via scripts to point to one another?  
Is the natural step to eventually combine the Shibboleth origin and 
target to one Shibboleth system which is capable of performing both 
roles, in which case this may be more valuable?  Or do you find more 
value in testing by accessing a pre-made set of test origins or 
targets, although some element of federation must be accommodated?

There may have been other questions which came up which I can't 
remember offhand.  Are there any modifications, suggestions, or other 
questions we should ask?

Thanks,
Nate.