What can we do to help? WAS: Re: Group Memberships & ACL permissions?

[Jeremy Allison]

Dana Canfield wrote:
> 
> Judging from the number of .edu addresses, I suspect that many of who are
> "going production" with the current CVS code are doing so because the decision
> has been made to use NT in labs or desktops in the next school year.  We need
> to avoid setting up several WinNT servers just to switch back to Unix/Samba
> the following year when the code is "stable".
> 
> So, my next set of questions are:
> 
> 1) Is there any chance whatsoever that there might be "stable" NTDOMAIN
> release (even if it lacks some features) by maybe late July?

Unlikely but possible.

I'm planning that the next major release (1.9.19) will 
behave correctly as a domain client when run in a domain 
with an NT PDC, but not have the domain controller support 
turned on by default.

> 2) I'm trying to fix work on some documentation, but are there other things
> that us non-coders can be doing to help you guys along?  I've vaguely picked
> up on the fact that you need some packet trace logs, etc. to reverse engineer
> some of these things.  Would it be possible for someone to put together some
> instructions on how to do this, and what exactly you need?
> 

Probably not, as we have the logs we need, it now needs
development work on the head tree to code up the features
and test them. Once the feature set is stable, writing
documentation will be a great help. Development is not
paralellizable, I'm afraid, although bugfixing is.

Also remember targeting the next release for users who
have a NT PDC gives a much smaller feature set for us
to aim at. The PDC work can continue in the background,
but I want to get a stable Samba release that will do
NT client domain logons when people access it ASAP, as
there are many people who are being forced to go with
NT servers just to fix the 'single sign-on' problem,
and this is a larger set than the users who are trying
to replace the PDC (at the moment - I have hopes this
will change).

> Please understand that I really do not mean this as a "how much longer?"
> post.  It just seems to me that for a lot of the "early majority" schools,
> this is the year to switch to NT, and I'd hate to see us miss out on this
> opportunity by just a couple of months or so.
> 

I know - but it just isn't ready yet. Getting the original
'Welcome to the Samba domain' was an amazing feat, but it's
only 10% of the work to make a Samba PDC a reality. I'm trying to
plan how we can get there by building on a stable reputation.

I don't want to give Samba the reputation as "that half-built
thing that's always nearly a domain controller but not quite".

I'm trying to set expectations of what we can do, and how
best to plan for the day when we can announce the PDC code
is stable (and get a big press blitz :-).

Jeremy.



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