Future and plans for libnet? Why 'all the way with ejs'?

[Alan DeKok]

tridge at samba.org wrote:
> Until ejs we never had a scripting language that we could assume all
> installs of Samba would have (apart from bourne shell). So while the
> python interfaces to our libraries were a neat idea, we could not
> build core tools like smbclient or smbstatus in python, as we would
> then also need to maintain C versions for platforms where python is
> not installed.

  This is a problem with many, many open source projects.  There's a
desperate need for a tiny, embedded, extensible, interpreted scripting
language.

  The only problem is coming up with something that everyone likes.
Existing samples are things like Lua and Squirrel, neither of which
I'm comfortable with.

> We have nearly all the pieces in place to do this now. ejs scripts can
> access smb.conf, can access ldb and can make any rpc call. So
> replacing provision.pl with a ejs script should not be hard.

  And simpler to maintain, with fewer external dependencies.

  My one suggestion is to placate the people who want "more" out of
the language, by adding some kind of Perl plugin.  But that's a low
priority.

  Alan DeKok.