Externalizing <ApplicationOverride>s

[Cantor, Scott]

On 4/5/18, 11:58 AM, "users on behalf of Tom Zeller" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of tzeller at dragonacea.biz> wrote:

> Parity with Apache virtual hosts sounds nice.

If the point is just structural modularity and not delegation of control, that's not all that hard to pull off. It also creates ugly race conditions between processes that can break things, but that's more a deployer beware kind of thing.

It just isn't clear to me that was the use case behind the request.

Also, any time on overrides is better spent enhancing the code to avoid the need for overrides. The concept of "Application" in the SP has always been its worst feature and it's been a long process of adding features to end-around the need to use it.

I know a lot of the reasons they get used, and I have no sympathy for some of them (e.g. siloed applications which are a pox).

A common one that is not avoidable now is overriding the entityID by vhost. It's common to have a bunch of silly overrides that do nothing but assign a different entityID, and nothing else, they're one liners. I think I know why I never actually made it possible to override the SP's entityID by RequestMap settings but I think fixing that would be time better spent, and I think it can be done.

-- Scott