Shibboleth Developers

["Scott Cantor" <>]

So, we had a fairly extended discussion about this on the last design call
(over a week ago). I need to update the wiki, but in the meantime, the
consensus for the moment was that I should start by focusing on simplifying
and removing/defaulting content in the XML file, which is something I've
been doing in fits and starts anyway.

I've already pushed all the SecurityPolicy material out to a separate file
(and the source of the policy is pluggable now), and I'm going to continue
by working to default a lot of additional material:

- listeners (assume domain socket on Unix, TCP on Windows, usual port/acl
settings)
- storage/cache material (probably create a new wrapper element to declare
all this at once as a unit, and default to in-memory with default settings)
- handlers (this is the biggest win, but the hardest to do, I don't know
what I'm going to do just yet)

I probably will also try and create Unix and Windows versions of the file so
I can pull the ISAPI stuff from the Unix version since it's just wasted
space.

In general, the plan is to remove anything that doesn't normally get
changed. There will be a "full" version of the file installed alongside the
default version so that people still have a complete example to use. And of
course, nothing is breaking, all the old files will remain valid.

I am not ruling out looking at a tool to translate from something like an
INI file into XML in the future. But I may wait until after 2.4 to work on
that, simply because there are a lot of useful changes already done, and
coming soon, and I'd like to finish it this year. Simplifying the XML helps
everybody, and is less work, so I want to start there.

-- Scott