[Samba] HTML docs and the removal of SWAT in 4.1

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2013-10-11 at 15:17 -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
> On 2013-10-11 9:49 AM, samba-request at lists.samba.org 
> <samba-request at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> > REMOVED COMPONENTS
> > ==================
> >
> > The Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT) has been removed.
> > Details why SWAT has been removed can be found on the samba-technical mailing
> > list:
> >
> > https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2013-February/090572.html
> 
> Just curious what was decided about this comment (he has a very 
> excellent point):
> 
> "I have yet to make the jump to Samba4, so I have not seen the version of
> SWAT designed for it.
> 
> For me, the primary benefit of SWAT in Samba3 was the ability to use the
> help link for any parameter to see what that parameter did, what the
> default was, and what its proper syntax was.  For reference, I ran "man
> smb.conf".  Viewing full screen, I pressed the "Page Down" key 34 times
> and was still in the 1st third of the alphabetical listing of
> parameters.  It's no small wonder that I never used "man smb.conf" to
> configure Samba.  SWAT was my friend.
> 
> So, if Samba4 has anywhere near the number of parameters as Samba3, I
> would be greatly disappointed to see SWAT go away entirely.  An html
> version of the samba-doc package that contained all parameters with
> links to their definitions/descriptions would be a welcome and suitable
> replacement.

You can search the manpage with the normal pager commands
(eg /directory).

No matter if we would have liked to keep SWAT around, it was simply not
maintained, and fixing the CVE issues only introduced other issues. 

HTML documentation should be generated by running 'make htmlman' in the
docs-xml directory, but some of this seems to have bitrotted, at least
in my brief testing.  Patches to have HTML manpages generated by our
main buildsystem (see docs-xml/wscript_build and
buildtools/wafsamba/wafsamba.py) are most welcome. 

Andrew Bartlett

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