[TNG] Status (and merging)

Gerald Carter gcarter at valinux.com
Mon Jul 24 12:00:57 GMT 2000


David Bannon wrote:
> 
> Does this mean that we are heading into the same dead 
> end that stopped the 'old head branch' circa mid '99 ? 

Possibly.  We've all known this though, and I've even 
said it on this list.  There's no reason to get back
into the why this happened again.  If you've been 
around long enough, you know why.  TNG was never meant 
to become a release branch.  It was meant for Luke to 
experiment with so that development in the main branch
could continue and releases/bugfixes could continually
be done.

> If TNG cannot be merged back into mainstream Samba 
> then that sounds like mainstream Samba won't do PDC 
> to W2000 and that is plain scary.

Nope.  That's not what i said.  We have to grab designs
and code from TNG but certain things like 20 daemons
to run Samba will mostly likely remain only in TNG.

> Can I suggest the team considers slowing down on some 
> of the gee wiz functions and concentrating on heading 
> towards a useable product for people like me who face 
> the prospect of needing a PDC that accepts W2000 clients
> and provides performance similar to 'main stream' samba. 

I'm going to follow up with a general roadmap message
and everyone can respond with which wiz bang features
we're working on that no one wants.  Fair enough.

> The pressure for a product like this is getting pretty 
> significent, even I have started to think about products 
> from the Evil Empire ! (Not seriously but Samba must
> fight to remain relevent).

Well, I'm going to play the other side here, ok?  I've 
run the Samba PDC code in a production environment, so I 
think I qualify as a voice of reason here.

If I were to take you statement at face value, then 
Samba would not be relevant today (since it does not 
offer a full PDC implementation).  However, we all know
based up these mailing lists, that is not the case.

Currently, the Samba team is made up of about 2 dozen 
people.  So I'm sure that begs the question, "How does 
one become a member?"  It's not hard really.  Write code,
write documentation, take the ball an run with it (remember 
that Andrew is the benevolent dictator in this).

Now out of two dozen members (grown in size over the years),
code check ins now-a-days are by about 1/2 dozen people.
That's a programming team of 6 people staring at bits on 
the wire, reading as much documentation as is available
(writing it in other cases), and still trying to maintainable
code quality in releases.

Does anyone here realize that we had to rewrite the entire
locking semantics for 2.2.0?  it is now what we believe to 
be the most robust, and solid locking code available in 
Samba or out. (ask me this again after the release of 
2.2.0 though :) ).  Andrew has also implemented a small 
database library and we've lookup stores to this in 
order to improve speed and scalability.

My point is that no one has said anything about these
(although they were extremely necessary).  How do I know
they were necessary and not simply some exercise in frivolous
coding?  Because I can dig up benchmarks that showed 
extreme numbers of context switches on Sun E3000 running 
Solaris 2.6 due to lookups in the status.lck file 
upon startup of a new smbd.

So at this point I'm probably rambling.  I hope that no 
one has taken offense as it was certainly not meant in 
anyway.  I just think what has happened (and please don't 
anyone take this wrong), is that to focus on the PDC
implementation is but one part of the whole.  Maybe 
everyone has got stars in their eyes from watching Luke 
(and Elrond and Matty and others) work on this.  I 
don't know.  They've all done incredible work.  Just be 
careful not to downplay those that keep releases coming 
and fix bugs so that MS Word can save to a Samba 
share. :-) :-)

Until you actually look at the code in TNG
and then look at the code in HEAD, you will **never** 
understand what we talk about the differences between 
the two.  Trust me on this one.  I know that which I 
speak of since working on the rpcclient merge from TNG 
into HEAD. :-)

That's it for now. 

<aside>
  	David, although this was in response to a message 
	from you, I didn't send you a direct reply since 
	it was addressed more as an open letter.
</aside>

Please, no flames, ok?  I will gladly respond to logical
questions comments, but not flames.  I'm way too busy 
right now.

Oh...and thanks for using Samba. :-) :-)




Cheers,
jerry
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   /\  Gerald (Jerry) Carter                     Professional Services
 \/    http://www.valinux.com  VA Linux Systems    gcarter at valinux.com
       http://www.samba.org       SAMBA Team           jerry at samba.org
       http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~cartegw

       "...a hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
                                - Sting "Message in a Bottle" ( 1979 )




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