[Galene] Re: Anonymous access

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

> My only gripe with galenectl is that it needs galene to run to work

Yes, that's the design.

> I understand the utility of changing configs on a live server. But
> have you considered having galenectl work directly on the JSON files

The API is required, since people want to be able to programatically
administer a running Galene server from arbitrary languages:

  - JavaScript: static/change-password.js
  - Python: <https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39792>
  - PHP: <https://github.com/movim/movim/tree/master/app/Workers/Galener/>

Galenectl is just a thin wrapper around the API, it's a convenient
byproduct.  But I agree this has some limitations:

  - the server has to be running;

  - there is a need for a Galene-specific authorisation mechanism,
    adequate Unix permissions are not enough.

Since editing files on disk is still supported, I think this doesn't
warrant spending time on writing a second backend for galenectl.

> and then send SIGHUP to the running galene process (if any) to reload
> configs?

No need, if you modify a file on disk Galene will notice it at the next
login and invalidate its cached copy.  (Assuming your filesystem
implements modification time correctly, please don't put your config on
a CP/M filesystem.)

-- Juliusz