udev rules to vdev ACLs compiler

[jcnelson]

Create and document a script that compiles udev rules into vdev ACL definitions.

[GravisZro]

do you mean you just need a udev rule parser or is there a specific format to convert them to?

[jcnelson]

I need a way to translate a udev rules file into one or more vdev-specific files, to ease migrating from udev to vdev. At the time of this writing (and I apologize that this is currently undocumented), vdev uses ini-style files to describe ACLs to apply and actions to take when a device appears or disappears. They're completely different from udev rules files.

As much as I would have liked to, I couldn't use udev's rules format for vdev because:

• it isn't expressive enough to do per-process access control (something vdev will need to do)
• it suffers from mission creep (example: why do rules files need flow-control with GOTO?), requiring a complex parser implementation in vdev
• since udev is a moving target, it would be hard to keep a vdev-specific re-implementation of udev's rules parser consistent with upstream (and since I plan to dual-license vdev under something BSD-ish, I would need to make clean-room re-implementation, not a fork).

[GravisZro]

ok... while i didnt actually make it write out to an ini format (not sure exactly how you want it), i did make a udev rules file parser from scratch. it should be easy to make it do what you like, the default behavior just prints the rules after they are parsed. here: http://adaptivetime.com/udev_parser.tar.gz do whatever you like with it.

[jcnelson]

Hey, this is great! Thank you so much! I can definitely use this as a starting point for converter tool.

In the quite likely event that your code gets incorporated into a tool in the master branch, can you please let me know:

• if you would be willing to license your code under the ISC license?
• how you would like to be named in the CONTRIBUTORS file, or any subsequent credits listing? If you'd prefer to talk privately, please feel free to email me.

Thanks!

[GravisZro]

the ISC license is fine and sure, just list me as "Gravis". i've been working on a wikicode parser so this was a cakewalk. :)