General_considerations

This page covers questions that plugin developers that want to extend FreeIPA should consider.

Please use Design page template for your proposal. Following list of questions can help you to find holes in the design. The proposed design should be linked from V4 Proposals section.

LDAP Related Questions

• Are you planning to add new objects or extend existing ones?

• What attributes and objectclasses would you need to add to the schema?

• Are those objectclasses ABSTRACT, AUXILIARY or STRUCTURAL?

• What is the name-prefix you are going to use for your objectclasses and attributes in order to define a namespace?

• What is the base OID and specific OIDs that you are going to use for your attributes and objectclasses?

• Where in the tree will your entries be located?

• Do you have any configuration entries that you plan to store in Directory Server?

• Do you have any entries that need to be preloaded?

• What are the read/write/… permissions for your entries?

• Are you planning to also import schema defined by a third party that is not yet a part of FreeIPA?

Integration and source control related questions

• Do you see your solution to become a part of the core FreeIPA over time or as a stand alone independent offering?

• What source tree repository you are going to use: FreeIPA or an external independent repo?

• Do you plan to develop your features/extension/plugin in an independent project tree on fedorahosted or github or do you want your code to be a part of the core FreeIPA repo from the beginning?

• How you see the evolution of you project over time in context of the FreeIPA releases and milestones?

• What tool are you going to use for source control? GIT or something else?

• Who will have commit privileges to the code?

Process related questions

If answer is NO to any of the questions in this section you project can’t be a part of the FreeIPA tree and most likely would not be integrated and supported as a part of FreeIPA core functionality.

• Are you going to follow the same coding style?

• Are you planning to use same or similar bug tracking system?

• Are you going to follow patch review process and patch naming conventions?

• Are you going to publish and review designs? Where?

Implementation related questions

• What are the CLI commands you are going to provide?

• Are they written following the same style the ‘ipa’ command uses ?

• Is help system implemented in the same way it is done in the ‘ipa’ command?

• Do you provide command line utilities to configure or enable/disable your solution?

• Do you provide man pages? Do man pages follow the style of the rest of the FreeIPA project?

• How is your solution installed?

• Is it installed on every replica or only on some?

• How you deal with upgrades?

• Do you provide a special upgrade script?

• How is your solution packaged?

• How is your solution uninstalled?

• Have you considered different replication configurations and topologies?

• Do you plan to implement unit tests? Do they provide sufficient coverage?

• How you plan to integrate with web UI?

• Do you plan to provide user and administrator documentation for your solution?

• Do you plan to provide DS plugins?

• What additional dependencies for the project does your new functionality add?

Security

• Does your solution introduce any security risk to the overall product?

• Are ACIs well thought through and properly implemented?

• Do you need to use clear text passwords, or otherwise any different method to perform authentication or store password hashes than what is already available in ipa ? Do you need to give clients access to the directory or other IPA controlled services using these alternative credentials or authentication methods? Why ?

• Do you need to implement special new crypto functions? Why?

• Does your plugin work in FIPS mode? (not a requirement at the moment)