(Final?) krb5.Conf Lexer/Parser Proposal

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 01:56:36PM -0800, Danilo Almeida wrote:
> Ah, I think I see two problems:
> 
> 1) The profile library cannot distinguish between subsections that are
> semantically a "directory of settings" versus a "setting which contains
> sub-items".  Therefore, the profile library cannot infer how to merge.
> 
> 2) Also, from the examples given, it looks like the profile library is happy
> to accept multlple ValueName = Value for the same ValueName.  Is that
> correct?  Similarly for subsections.

Correct.  When I originally designed it, I wanted something which was
simple and elegant, while extending the win.ini file format and the
Windows profile API to provide support for arbitrarily deep levels of
subsections, as well as configuration file chaining.   

> Windows does not allow #2 (unique value names) and does not have the problem
> in #1 because the app does the merging itself (for better or for worse).
> 
> If #2 is really the case in the profile library, I don't see any good way to
> deal w/o the final bit.
> 
> To get rid of #2, I think that one would have to support lists.  For
> instance:
> 
>     kdc = "kerberos.mit.edu:88", "kerberos-1.mit.edu:88"

Yep, that would be another way, but it means a lot more code to parse
lists, and I was trying to keep things simple.

					- Ted