[RFC] Discontinuing SWAT

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2013-04-25 at 23:48 +0200, Kai Blin wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I think it's time to put SWAT out of its misery. In the past few years,
> the only commits ever touching it were either API housekeeping or fixing
> remote root exploit security issues.
> 
> The last time we had to do the latter, I accidentally broke password
> changes for users, and neither me nor any of the people reviewing the
> changes noticed. I take that as a sign that nobody is really interested
> in maintaining SWAT, and I think it is becoming a larger liability over
> time. Considering how large of an attack surface a web app is offering,
> we should not have one of them in our core release.
> 
> There might be the need for a web-based samba configuration tool, but I
> don't think SWAT is fulfilling that need well enough.

The main thing I've see folks really want from SWAT is the connection
between the smb.conf parameter and the help section.  We may well be
able to solve that simply with a testparm option that prints the manpage
section after each parameter. 

I'll also note that this is the second time removing it has been
proposed (I did so in Feb), and there were no violent objections last
time, just the above desire that SWAT's sections and manpage link made
the smb.conf more accessible.  Perhaps make 'SWAT GTK rewrite' a SoC
project and see if we get any takers?

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org