[Owncloud] owncloud alpha 1 and LDAP entryUUID

[Andreas Ergenzinger]

On Tuesday, February 19, 2013 20:35 CET, Arthur Schiwon <blizzz at owncloud.com> wrote: 
> 
> Depends on where you tackle it. If you ensure uniqueness on LDAP side, 
> you are not getting a problem on ownCloud as long as you don't use other 
> user backends (which may have other problems). In some cases it is 
> necessary that display names can be modified, for instance when family 
> names change, titles needs to be added, or if job positions, departments 
> or likes are included in the display name.
> 
> When you take a step back and look at a bigger picture, some backends do 
> not provide user lists (IMAP, WebDAV) so you cannot see which names are 
> already in use. Shifting it all to ownCloud core means drawbacks as 
> stated above.
> 
> The LDAP backend really takes care that _internal_ names stay unique. As 
> it was up to 4.5 they also were used as display names which did not make 
> all people happy, because of the limitations.
> 
> Note that not every available user backend takes care of unique names 
> (ownCloud's internal does, IMAP or WebDAV don't afaik).

Okay, I am beginning to understand your reasoning.

Let's say we try to base this identifier on the email address (e.g. "John Doe (j.doe at gmail.com)", then we replace the requirement of unique display names by the requirement that every user backend must be able to provide an email address for its users. I believe this might not always be possible. A couple of months ago I wrote  a user backend that retrieved its user information from a database which enforced neither the presence, nor the correctness, nor the uniqueness of the email addresses. For other authentication mechanisms there might be technical reasons why the email address isn't available. In such cases we might fall back to the login name as unique attribute.

This doesn't solve the (admittedly remote) problem of trying to hook up two user databases which contain identical [display name, email] entry tuples, but I think I can live with that.

Andreas