Deleting parameters.

[andrew morgan]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Sean Elble wrote:
>
> > My point here was that RPM offers the capability to run a script adter
> > the installation; a migration script would be a perfect example for
> > that "post install" script. Yes, someone would have to write that
> > (ideally not me, since I can barely program Hello world in Perl :-),
> > but I'm sure someone handy with Perl could put one of them out in less
> > than a day. Could be wrong though, but it is definitely a capability
> > worth investigating.
>
> Right.  And i understood what you were getting at.  The problem
> here is that we cannot rely on RPM to solve our problem
> because then the migration path break when you use Solaris
> (which I hear a few people still do :) )

I'm just a Samba user really, but I lurk on this list so I know where
samba is headed and when new releases are coming out.  I run Samba on
Solaris and Linux (RedHat right now).  I compile everything from source,
so I would probably be the most affected by any smb.conf changes.

That said, I don't have any problem with you guys changing smb.conf around
between major releases.  If you decided to rewrite all the parameters, I
might be annoyed but I would just read the docs and write a new smb.conf.
Between major releases, I don't have any expectation that the interfaces
will stay the same.  I certainly didn't expect everything to work the same
between Samba 1.x and 2.x.  I'm still running Samba 2.0.7 because it
sounded like there were a lot of differences in 2.2.x (not config wise,
but in the architecture).

This is what major releases are for.  Significant new features, major code
changes, interface rewrites...  If you're not willing to make changes for
3.0, when will you?

> I'm am not against changing parameters (everyone know how much
> I hate "read only/writeable/writable"), I'm just not convinced yet
> and want to be enough of a pain that we think before we act. :-)
>
> cheers, jerry

I'd like to toss in my two cents about parameters as well.

***There are too many parameters.***

Get rid of all the redundant parameters.  If the goal is to make things
easy for the admin, then having redundant/unnecessary parameters is a step
backwards.  I don't care if somebody else can't spell "writable", having a
duplicate parameter under another spelling does not solve the problem.
Having the same parameter but in negative logic form does not help either.

If you can collapse multiple parameters into one parameter in a simple,
easy to understand fashion, then do so.

<stepping off my soap box...>

	Andy