[RFC] Discontinuing SWAT

Jelmer Vernooij jelmer at samba.org
Fri Apr 26 09:31:57 MDT 2013


On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 03:11:16PM +0200, Kai Blin wrote:
> On 2013-04-26 04:34, Scott Lovenberg wrote:
> >On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:14 PM, C.J. Adams-Collier KF7BMP
> ><cjac at colliertech.org> wrote:
> ...
> 
> >>For what it's worth, my opinion as a user of samba for about 15 years is
> >>that SWAT has not been very helpful for me for many years.  I do
> >>remember depending on it for the first few months and years that I used
> >>samba to set up my smb.conf file, and I might not have been able to get
> >>a working environment without the web interface at that phase in my
> >>professional development.  As much as I like the idea of throwing out
> >>code that gets more CVEs than it does commits, it would be best to
> >>ensure that there is an interface for our less skilled users available
> >>during a deprecation phase that we can recommend loudly instead.
> >>
> >>C.J.
> >>
> >
> >How about the obvious compromise?  What if SWAT were dropped and a
> >library (in a "web language") for parsing the smb.conf was to be
> >released with each release under the GPL?  If someone (third party)
> >wants to carry the torch for a web interface, let them.  Someone out
> >there wants this itch scratched and Samba wants someone to contribute
> >some code back.  Seems like a win-win to me; Samba can be released
> >without such a large attack surface, and developers can scratch an
> >itch and contribute code back.
> >
> >There's already a parser written, how hard would it be to add bindings
> >for other languages (PHP, Python, Java)?
> 
> Arguably to make something really useful, you'd need something that
> can talk to AD as well. Fiddling with smb.conf is only good for the
> plain file server.
> 
> In any case, if someone wants to step up and maintain a web
> interface, I'm sure we'd be happy to help.
Note that there also "SWAT2", which was written by a SoC student
in Python and pyramid on top of the Samba Python bindings.

It seems to be fairly hard to set up, but it might be a good starting
point for somebody who wants to reboot SWAT.

Cheers,

Jelmer


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