RFC: reduce number of alias parameters

Rowland Penny rpenny at samba.org
Mon Dec 11 11:58:12 UTC 2017


On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 12:20:38 +0100
Björn JACKE via samba-technical <samba-technical at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I think it's not useful to have a huge number of aliases just to make
> the parameters expressable is different humand wordings or spellings.
> They increase the code and binary size and more importantly they make
> config parsing and more difficult and error prone. For some parameter
> aliases which are not very commonly used imho, I'd like to propose to
> remove them for the next release. Given that Metze already removed a
> number of other parameters this would to be a good time to do some
> more tidying up:
> 
> - ldap ssl ads (we should consider to remove related code)
> - unicode (we should consider to remove related code)
> - casesignames (alias for case insensitive)
> - group (alias for force group)
> - only guest (alias for goest only)
> - allow hosts (alias for hosts allow)
> - deny hosts (alias for hosts deny)
> - lock directory (alias for lock dir)
> - debuglevel (alias for log level)
> - directory (alias for path)
> - exec (alias for preexec)
> - prefered master (typo alias for preferred master)
> - printer (alias for printer name)
> - printcap (alias for printcap name)
> - private directory (alias for private dir)
> - root / root dir ( alias for root directory)
> - max protocol (confusing alias for server max protocol)
> - protocol (even more confusing parameter for server max protocol)
> - min protocol (confusing alias for server min protocol)
> - vfs object (alias for vfs objects)
> - write ok (rarely used alias for read only / writable)
> 
> Björn

Hi Bjorn,
I have never really understood all these synonyms. If the parameter
was created in the first place with a typo, surely this should have
been noticed and fixed before it got into the code, but it seems they
weren't and instead of fixing them correctly, the synonyms were
created. I personally would like to see all the synonyms go away, but
you missed one, writable <-> writeable and this raises the question,
why does samba have 'read only' and 'writeable' ? I have seen numerous
smb.conf files that contain:

read only = No
writeable = Yes

So it seems that a lot of users don't understand they mean the same
thing. Perhaps we should remove 'writable' and 'writeable' as well.

Just my 2p's worth

Rowland
  



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