a proposal for Samba 3.5

[tridge at samba.org]

Kurt,

 > Even if "net" was/became a full replacement of rpcclient, the removal
 > of rpcclient would break a lot of existing (CUPS) installations, if
 > Samba was upgraded.

There is no reason why an old rpcclient from Samba3.0 could not be
kept around on older CUPS systems. As it is a standalone tool it could
be installed in parallel with any future version of Samba. To achieve
this the distributions would need to do some work to get dependencies
(and possibly package splitting) right.

What we are telling you is that in a future version of Samba the
current rpcclient tool will go away. The tool is too fundamentally
broken in design (both interface and internally) to survive.

Before that happens we need to find out exactly what capabilities of
rpcclient CUPS uses so we can provide substitute sub-commands in the
net utility. Then CUPS will need to be changed to use the new net
interface, and fall back to rpcclient if the new interface is not
present. If someone wants to do a (scripted or otherwise) wrapper to
make this easier then thats fine too.

We made a mistake in documenting rpcclient as a tool for general
use. I am sorry for that mistake, but I'm afraid that keeping the tool
around forever in its current form would be an even bigger mistake.

Cheers, Tridge