Nicolas Williams' source environment variables
David Collier-Brown
davecb at canada.sun.com
Sat Jan 29 17:44:19 GMT 2000
I've been wondering about what programming primitives one needs
in and smb.conf ile fro a long time, and Mr. Williams' patch
re-raises this question.
In a very early version of the O'Reilly book, I described the
smb.conf file as having all the basic primitives of a programming
language:
variable assignment
conditional code ("include" and "copy" using a %-variable)
blocks (files, sections)
but lacking a way of setting a %-variable.
This was too academic, and promptly disappeard from the book,
but it is a decent question of the development team: how much
programmability should there be in the main smb.conf file?
I've seen two proposal to extend the language:
One was from a site with a very large .conf file that contained
the definition of all the shares for a cloud of servers. They wanted
a way to ignore inappropriaste shares, and save memory thereby.
The other is Mr. Williams' proposal, to do conditionals on
netbios names, and to provide a general ${env-var} construct, which
they use for Samba-failover on a Veritas HA server.
On the other hand, smb.conf is a much easier language to read and
maintain than, say, tcl. We may well want to keep it that way!
So: what about a way to set a variable (environment or %)? Does
that buy enough to make it worth the extra complexity?
--dave
--
David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify
185 Ellerslie Ave., | some people and astonish the rest.
Willowdale, Ontario, | -- Mark Twain
CANADA. 416-223-8968 | davecb at canada.sun.com
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