Shibboleth Developers

["caleb racey" <>]

>-- should the package include multiple pre-configured config files
>(useful for various situations), or just a few cookbooks describing
>the steps to create a config for "situation X" (eg a bilateral config)

Preconfiged config files with comments are an excellent way of showing
what can be done. One of the problems of shib for the newbie is that
since everything is so flexible and configurable it is very difficult to
figure out what is sensible and "right" for their situation. When I have
deployed other services a couple of prerolled config files with comments
illustrating what they achieve has helped tremendously with
understanding how to put it together. It's also easy for various
federations/sites to then put up specimen config files of their own to
reflect the ins and outs of their setup.

Cookbooks are nice too but with big config files like idp.xml the
resolver configs etc  it can be tricky to convey which bits to edit
which bits to leave alone and which bits rely on other bits and which
bits don't really matter.