2.1.19 LDAP Duplication/Replication/Update Protocols (ldup) bof

Current Meeting Report

The LDUP BOF was attended by approximately 100 people. After reviewing the BOF
agenda, the co-chairs polled the room to determine who had reviewed the proposed
LDUP WG charter. No one other than the Engineering Team members had read the
proposed charter. Due to printing problems, neither co-chair actually had charts that
would support detailed review of the charter in the meeting. There was a suggestion
to shift detailed discussion of the charter to the end of the meeting while such charts
were created.

With this agenda change, Chris Apple reported on the LDUP Engineering Team's
progress since the last BOF:

- The LDAP replication requirements draft has been revised twice.

- We met face-to-face in May-1998 for a round-robin set of implementor LDAP
replication presentations.

- We held a follow-up conference call to resolve diverging uses of the same
terminology, identify and resolve any remaining issues in the requirements
document, and make a decision on whether or not to proceed with multiple LDAP
replication proposals. We all agreed that creating one set of LDAP replication
specifications is better than proceeding with multiple competing sets.

The LDUP Engineering Team is now moving forward with a single Replication
Architecture, which will produce (at least) seven major RFCs. The next section of the
meeting consisted of three presentations that were overviews of three of these seven
documents:

1) Russ Weiser gave a brief overview of the LDAP replication requirements document.

2) John Merrells gave a thorough and well received presentation on the pre-I-D version
of an LDAP Replication Architecture document. This document will serve as a
foundation for other documents currently being drafted by various members of the
LDUP Engineering Team. There were three significant issues identified during this
presentation (all of which will require careful attention over the coming months):

3) Ed Reed gave a brief overview of the LDAP Information Model document. The
document is currently under engineering team review. It will contain specifications
of schema elements required to implement replication agreements and replication
processes. During this presentation there was more discussion about the pros and
cons of time-based and monotonic sequence numbers for transactions in a distributed
replication environment. We agreed that this subject would be punted to the list.

We reviewed John Strassner's hand-written charts of content from the proposed WG
charter and John read aloud the sections of the charter that he didn't have time to scribe.
There were a few comments and requests for changes:

- the terms "updateable", "writeable" and similar terms are used interchangeably; we
agreed to use only the term "updateable"

- add a sentence indicating motivation for solving the single- and multi-master
replication problems

- replace terms like "zombies", "graveyard", and "tombstones" with "deletion state" or
a grammatically appropriate substitute add "v3" to all uses of "LDAP" in this charter

- use a consistent prefix for all document titles: "LDAPv3 Replication..."

- several milestone dates were changed to make them more realistic. It should be noted
that all of the authors of these documents that were present stated that they should be
able to hold these new dates.

The co-chairs have an action to post a revised proposed charter to the mailing list for a
review period of one week and will follow this up with a request for IESG review.

Three out of the 7 documents that group will produce have been drafted and are to be
published as I-Ds (or revised if already published) over the next few weeks.

When polled, BOF attendees expressed strong interest in forming a working group based
on the charter discussions and the architecture presentation. The BOF-room concensus
was that forming a WG is in order. No dissenting opinion was expressed. Finally, Patrik
stated that he has been monitoring the progress of the Engineering Team and is pleased,
and also thinks that forming a WG is a Good Thing.

Slides

None received

Attendees List

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