samba development

[Charles N. Owens]

Mike Black wrote:

> Luke...exactly who's in charge here???
> Who has the "authority" to dismiss your ideas?
> I always thought you were the MFWIC  (see
> http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall/abbrev.html if you don't know what this
> means).
> Maybe part of what you're seeing is the graduation of the SAMBA crowd from:
> You mean my windows boxes can see my Unix box without adding software to all
> my windows boxes??
> To:
> You mean I can no longer print with the new SAMBA release?
>
> In other words -- from R&D to production.
>
> >From my perspective I started getting disheartened with the "new" stuff when
> I saw SAMBA fractionalize into something like 3 or 4 different chains.
> I coudn't figure out what was going on.
> I think there should be two threads to SAMBA (which almost seems like where
> we are now)
> #1 - Production -- this requires incremental functional capability -- can't
> break previous capability
> #2 - R&D - wild and crazy ideas including complete rewrites if need be.
> Might break old stuff but the ultimate goal is more functionality.
>
> I would maintian that YOU should be in charge of #2 and somebody else in
> charge of #1.  This would be put you back in the drivers seat again.
>

I agree with this sort of approach whole heartedly.  For a good example of how
this dual branch development approach can work very well take a look at the
FreeBSD Project.  Their use of "Stable" and "Current" branches would, I think,
work very well for Samba.  How ever it is done, the main thing is that the
development approach be formalized and (gasp) documented, including policies
about when and how bits should be moved between branches.

Samba is very important to many many people and organizations.  Luke has been
been very very important to the growth and development of Samba.  Thus, (forgive
me if I sound corny) Luke is, and his contributions are, very important to many
people and organizations!  That this has not been made extremely clear to him is,
in a word, tragic.

Thanks Luke!!

--
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  Charles N. Owens                               Email: owensc at enc.edu
                                            http://www.enc.edu/~owensc
  Network & Systems Administrator
  Information Technology Services  "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
  Eastern Nazarene College         best friend.  Inside of a dog it's
                                   too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
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