(Final?) krb5.Conf Lexer/Parser Proposal

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 10:49:48AM -0500, Joseph Calzaretta wrote:
> >It would probably make things easier in this case to consider adding 
> >the concept of a finalizer not just to a section, but to an individual
> >relation, and to also extend the profile to support the concept of a 
> >"whitespace" relation, marks a relation as deleted.
> 
> So, for example,
> foo = {
>     bar = *
> }
> would prevent future files in the chain from creating a foo/bar = baz 
> relation?  Cool.

Yes, although I'd probably use a different syntax.  Either:

foo = {
    bar*
}

or

foo = {
	bar final
}

> Without such extensions (or something like them) it seems to be not 
> just harder but generally impossible to make minimal changes in the 
> user file (i.e., changes that don't affect seemingly unrelated 
> sections of the profile).   If the API has to override and duplicate 
> an entire section just to change one relation, the next time the 
> system file updates that section, the user's profile will be 
> inexplicably (to the user) stuck with some stale version.  

Yep, exactly.

						- Ted