tdbexport (was Re: Working on LDAP support in HEAD)

[Peter Samuelson]

[Tim Potter <tpot at linuxcare.com.au>]
> I've been thinking about this - currently there's no way to determine
> the type of some data stored in a tdb.  So I think it is therefore
> impossible to write a tdb exporter that can handle byte-ordering
> dependencies as this information is not stored in the tdb!

True!  I was thinking only of the byte order of the file format itself
-- *content* is completely untouched.  This is still useful for textual
tdb data like smbpasswd and wins.dat, and that was the real intent.

If you're going to start worrying about storing byte order for
arbitrary binary data, don't forget that people are dumping arbitrary
structs in these things.  So now you have to talk all about word sizes,
structure packing, floating point format, 1's/2's-complement (:, etc.
In the end, I doubt it's worth it.

Peter