Description of problem: OpenOffice.org in the Fedora/Red Hat releases should have support for LDAP address books, just as the binaries from OpenOffice.org do (for Windows and Linux) -- NOT through Evolution LDAP, as this is buggy and a user should not need to use Evolution just to allow this feature in OpenOffice. This feature was available in the OpenOffice 1.x releases. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): openoffice.org-core-2.0.2-5.17.2
The problem is that the openoffice.org upstream default LDAP support is based on using an older internal copy of mozilla hacked up a bit, and as such is riddled with possible security flaws from that release. The reason they were forced to patch an old mozilla rather than use a current one directly, is because of mozillabug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135137 1. If we link against our stock mozilla/firefox libraries we get the problems described in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135137 2. If we link against the patched upstream-style mozilla libs, we get the bloat of the extra libs, and we have to maintain a fairly dangerous from a security perspective extra set of moz libs So, if the mozilla guys fixed this problem, we could provide a LDAP solution through mozilla instead of, or as well as, through evolution. But for the moment I strongly suggest logging explicit LDAP problems with evolution against the evolution component.
I do appreciate your clarification. It seems that OpenOffice in Fedora could benefit from having a better solution, i.e. not being so dependant on Mozilla and querying LDAP directly and being able to map LDAP attributes:values from schmeas defined outside of Mozilla, such as inetOrgPerson, etc. Even better, it would be nice to be able to map whatever LDAP attributes I search for to whatever i want in OpenOffice: telephoneNumber --> workPhone (for example). I say this, especially since Mozilla is having trouble defining a better address book schema, see: http://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:LDAP_Address_Books
Yes, a direct LDAP driver instead of the existing options of a ldap-through-mozilla or a ldap-through-evolution would benefit all OOo distros