[Samba] Does the SWAT tool come with the Red Hat 8.0 distribution?

[Martin Pool]

On 10 Mar 2003, bkrusic at yahoo.com wrote:
> > Perhaps you could post your specific thoughts on
> > what an automated editor
> I understand that by using a GUI rather than command
> line will in some cases make things easier.  My
> experiance with Samba is that I had to research,
> implement and test many hours to get it working
> (albiet, I have a very highly specialized env, Post
> produstion, where file security, performance and paths
> must be the same on all platforms here - MacOSX,
> Linux, Windows, SGI).
> 
> If you feel Swat is a value add (it may be), it
> doesn't seem like it would be hard to not del lines
> starting with #.

Some people seem to like it.

A little more consideration of the problem will show that for a
program to preserve comments when it is not capable of understanding
their contents is quite hard.

 - Do the comments pertain to the line above or the line below, or to
   a whole block of lines?

 - Does the comment contain commented-out inactive code?

 - If a line is removed, should the comment next to it go too?

 - If lines are reordered what happens to the comments?

> I'm not sure what Samba uses to edit the file and 
> generate a new one but why not rely on utils like 
> grep and sed?

Regular IO.

At least three reasons:

 - producing gred/sed commands is much harder than just editing the
   damn thing

 - that doesn't solve the problem of understanding what the comments
   *mean*

 - grep/sed editing will be less reliable than directly writing the
   file.

> I'm not trying to be insulting to Samba.org, I'm just hard on
> technology and when it does something unexpected, I get
> uncomfortable.

The great thing about open source is that you can scratch your own
itches.  The bad thing is that you have to watch esr scratching his
itches in public. ;-)

-- 
Martin