Shibboleth Developers

[Lukas Haemmerle <>]

> I think we have different definitions of "hammered", although I don't have
> any stats to back that up. In other words, it seems like a very minor
> problem at this stage of the game, but that said...

Well, it's not really a problem now with only a hand full of IdPs and
SPs but I think the current metadatatool produces a substantial amount
of be unnecessary traffic if it is often run.

> I don't see any reason to overload metadatatool with this, what we need is a
> workable model for dynamic metadata delivery and caching that can be
> integrated directly into the plugins, and that's more or less what we're
> working toward. 

Ok. Good to know :)

> Not to metion that one could get rid of static files
> altogether and do something using a web service or whatever, where the
> authentication of the service takes the place of a signature.

That would be great.

>>Of course one could write a wrapper arround metadatatool and e.g. use
>>curl -I http://file.to/metadata.xml to do that but it would nevertheless
>>be nice if there was an option for the metadatatool that would allow the
>>above out of the box.
> 
> 
> I disagree. If anything, I think metadatatool should do less, not more.
> Something like curl (or a Java equivalent) will always have much richer
> support for HTTP-based features like this, and we'd be wrong to try and
> duplicate them. I *never* use anything but a wrapper script around
> siterefresh as it is.

I think we agree that the main benefit of the metadatatool is the
validation of the metadata. In fact that is the only reason why one
would use it.
So, one could argue like you and reduce the tools functionality to the
minimum. Then again I wonder why the downloading capability was added as
a feature at all. I guess it was to enhance the ease-of use, maybe to
prevent everybody writing their own wrapper scripts. However, I think
that quite some people exactly have done that, which implies that there
still are some features that could be useful to add, among them the one
I suggested.

But in the end a dynamic solution of course could prove to be even better.

Lukas

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