(Final?) krb5.Conf Lexer/Parser Proposal

[Joseph Calzaretta]

At 05:51 PM 1/7/2006, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>Hence, if the a GUI program tries to use the profile library to 
>display the the results from multiple configuration files, and then 
>tries to edit them, *it*
>*will* *fail*.  It can't possibly succeed, because the API is simply 
>not adequate to the task.  See?

Sure.  One of the parts of rewriting the profile library will be to 
propose a new API (not sure what that looks like yet, future thread 
alert) which is as powerful as it has to be to do (for example) 
programmatic editing, while still implementing the current API 
(deprecated where appropriate) so that rugs aren't pulled out from 
under existing apps.

>If I was going to add it, it would be in separate library, separate 
>from the core functionality (since most applications would probably 
>not need it),

Good idea.

>and it would only allow the calling application to open one file at 
>a time, thus removing the inherent ambiguities and traps in the 
>current implementation.

That is one way to handle it, although it would (as you mention 
elsewhere) force the calling application to figure out the 
implications of combining several files, meaning that a full-featured 
profile editing tool would need to duplicate much of the work of the 
profile library (merging the trees, for example).  Another way is to 
expand the API so that callers specify a file on which to perform 
each action.  This is not necessarily the right way to do it (gives 
callers too much power and responsibility) but is at least sufficient 
to get it done.

--Joe

Joe Calzaretta
Software Development & Integration Team
MIT Information Services & Technology