On 10 Mar 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Perhaps you could post your specific thoughts on > > what an automated editor > I understand that by using a GUI rather than command > line will in some cases make things easier. My > experiance with Samba is that I had to research, > implement and test many hours to get it working > (albiet, I have a very highly specialized env, Post > produstion, where file security, performance and paths > must be the same on all platforms here - MacOSX, > Linux, Windows, SGI). > > If you feel Swat is a value add (it may be), it > doesn't seem like it would be hard to not del lines > starting with #.
Some people seem to like it. A little more consideration of the problem will show that for a program to preserve comments when it is not capable of understanding their contents is quite hard. - Do the comments pertain to the line above or the line below, or to a whole block of lines? - Does the comment contain commented-out inactive code? - If a line is removed, should the comment next to it go too? - If lines are reordered what happens to the comments? > I'm not sure what Samba uses to edit the file and > generate a new one but why not rely on utils like > grep and sed? Regular IO. At least three reasons: - producing gred/sed commands is much harder than just editing the damn thing - that doesn't solve the problem of understanding what the comments *mean* - grep/sed editing will be less reliable than directly writing the file. > I'm not trying to be insulting to Samba.org, I'm just hard on > technology and when it does something unexpected, I get > uncomfortable. The great thing about open source is that you can scratch your own itches. The bad thing is that you have to watch esr scratching his itches in public. ;-) -- Martin -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba