Shibboleth Developers

["Tom Scavo" <>]

On 6/30/06, Chad La Joie 
<>
 wrote:
> Tom Scavo wrote:
>
> > I think the answer to the above question is no, but I wanted to ask to
> > make sure.  In that case, is it reasonable to ask for such an
> > enhancement?
>
> I've considered adding it.  It could be useful in some cases but the chance to
> screw stuff up is huge so I'm trying to think of ways to decrease that before
> adding such functionality.  I suspect no such solution exists and that such a
> function will not materialize in the build process.

Hmm.  There are at least two things I need this for.  First, I'd like
to do macro expansion of arbitrary tokens on files in arbitrary
extension subdirectories.  In particular, I'd like to expand on the
html documentation in doc, expanding $IDP_HOME$, $TOMCAT_HOME$,
$EXTENSION_NAME$, and a few other extension-specific tokens.  This
leads to personalized documentation.

The second need is for the dynamic creation of properties files on the
classpath at install time.  We currently have a number of properties
files with properties whose values depend on the values of other
properties in user-configurable properties files.  Right now these
dependent properties files are generated at distribution time, which
of course leads to bugs if a user modifies a configuration property at
install time.

AFAICT it's not possible to do these things now.  As a workaround,
I've created a build file in the extension subdirectory and call the
shib build file from there.  I haven't documented this, and I don't
really want to since that's not the way installation is supposed to
occur, but I don't see how to get this added functionality without it.

Thoughts?

Tom