Proposed lexer for parsing krb5.conf files

[Wyllys Ingersoll]

Jeffrey Altman wrote:
>  Wyllys Ingersoll wrote:
>
> > Agreed, I was not proposing that at all.   Keep support for the old
> >  format, but design the new one in XML - make the code smart enough
> > to know how to choose the right way to parse it. I don't see how
> > this would break interop.
>
>  It is the writing of the old format that we are attempting to fix. We
>  are not trying to develop a new format for the sake of developing a
>  new format.   We are trying to fix a broken implementation of the
>  krb5.conf format that results in unintentional data corruption when
>  writing the imported profile data back out to the file.


The email from Joe Calzaretta was proposing new parser.  Someone
else chimed in that as long as you are going to the trouble, why
not use XML since there are already existing libraries of code
to parse XML.  That is what sparked my interest in proposing XML.

If you are just fixing a problem with the existing krb5.conf, then
so be it, but moving to a "better" format is worth more discussion,
IMO.



>  The Windows and MacOSX credential managers provide GUI tools for the
>  editing the contents of the file.  It is crucial that these functions
>  work correctly.  (The data that is corrupted is the ordering of the
>  CAPATH data.)


It would be alot easier for *all* platforms to provide such a tool if
the data was in a more standard format in the first place.

-Wyllys