samba 4: a new configuration system?

[David Collier-Brown]

Sebastien Estienne wrote:
> But i think from a Gui (or anyone who wants to "programmaticaly"
> configure samba) point of view, the back end is not really important.
> It will be fine if it's a text backup or an ldiff one, or even a mix of both.

	Indeed, that person doesn't care, and need not care.
	The systems programmer, however, needs to know 
	1) where the data is,
	2) that it is stored uniquely
	3) that she can convert between the formats and/or
	   export data in a different format without
	   breaking (2)

> An other problem is the validation of data. i think validation of the
> data shouldn't be done in the gui, but in the api (returning an error
> code).
> 
> These problems have been faced by everyone who tried to build a gui on
> top of text config file. (swat for example). I'm also posting here,
> because i tried it, and noticed the problem, and i think that each
> developper who tried to develop this kind of gui has duplicated code
> that other already writtend to solve the same problem. (eg: smb.conf
> parser).

	Yup: strongly agree. 
	Will happily contribute to consistency-checking effort.

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,      | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at canada.sun.com     |                      -- Mark Twain
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