a proposal for Samba 3.5

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 04:54, Michael Sweet wrote:
> tridge at samba.org wrote:
>  > ...
>  > It should be relatively easy to replace most uses of RPC in Samba3.5
>  > with the Samba4 RPC library, except perhaps for the rpcclient tool. I
>  > would suggest removing the rpcclient tool in Samba3.5, and instead
>  > work towards writing a new tool with equivalent functionality
>  > (possibly even basing the new tool on Tim's python or perl interfaces
>  > to the library).
>  > ...
> 
> I would argue strongly against providing a scripted replacement,
> as few commercial platforms come with a recent version of Perl or
> any version of Python.  A C-based tool shouldn't be that much
> harder to write and would be as portable as Samba itself.

We need to create and maintain scripting interfaces to the things
rpcclient calls.  We also need rpcclient - which is only a thin shim
over these calls.  By maintaining it as a working example of the
scripting interface, not only do we make it's development easier, we
ensure that both parts are actively maintained.

If this were 'smbclient' we were talking about, I would be more
sympathetic, but rpcclient is considered a developers testing tool at
best and I think it (and smbtorture for that matter) could benefit from
what scripting brings us.  Is it really that hard to install python or
perl, for a developer?  (Any more-so than installing samba4 itself?)

We already have a python dependency in any case, for the (optional) self
test framework.

> Also, rpcclient is used by CUPS (among other projects) to install
> printer drivers for Windows clients; this is very big deal and
> if rpcclient disappears then we will have to come up with an
> alternate means of doing this that will also work with Samba
> 3.0 and earlier.

CUPS should never have used rpcclient like that, nor assumed that our
internal testing tool would have an interface sufficiently consistent
for use in the way that cupsaddsmb does.

The tool which we provide for that purpose is 'net' - and I think that
the tasks CUPS needs to perform should be done via a new incarnation of
that interface.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net
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