TODO list proposal for volunteers

[Gerald Carter]

[cross posted on all samba mailing lists]

Folks,

This is a very rough list of items off the top of 
my head.  It should be considered dynamic and I will 
post periodic updates on progress, new items, etc...

Please direct all mail regarding this to samba-technical
and not samba-ntdom nor the main samba mailing list.
I am posting it on the latter mailing lists to keep 
people in the loop.  However, actual development work
should be coordinated on samba-technical.  

Documentation work can be coordinated on samba-docs.

See http://lists.samba.org/ for information on the 
various mailing lists if you are unfamiliar.

Enjoy.





Cheers, jerry




Documentation
-------------

I will act as the contact point for documentation
updates.  We have a list named samba-docs that can 
be used for this purpose.  Probably best to coordinate 
there.

  o consolidate the existing text HOWTO's and HTML 
    FAQ's into a single admin guide document.  Some 
    of the information is outdated and needs to be filed
    in the "this used to be true pile" while stuff that is
    just wrong needs to be thrown out.

    All documentation needs to be converted to YODL
    (it's really easy) for generating HTML, text, etc...
  
    This is a fairly large project and could be 
    distributed among a few people once the initial layout
    and outline was decided upon.





Testing
-------

Jeremy will be the main contact person for this (via the
samba-technical list)

  o If all goes well, Samba 2.2.0 should be released in beta 
    form next week (first week in Oct)  We need volunteers 
    to help with testing, QA, etc... Printing support, 
    locking, ACLs, etc...

    The more environments tested, the better 
    quality the final release should be.


Coding Projects
---------------

All coding work needs to be coordinated with Jeremy 
and Andrew at the very least on samba-technical.
Don't just start coding and expect patches to 
automatically be integrated in.  Obviously. projects 
by specific team members, winbind for example, need 
to be coordinated with those team members in charge.

For those without CVS write access (non-team members),
patches should be incremental and in the form of 
context diffs.

I'm assuming if you want to code, you probably already
know how to get the source branches via anonymous CVS.
If not, see http://us4.samba.org/cvs.html


  o Moving server and client side RPC's back from 
    SAMBA_TNG to HEAD branch one at a time.  This 
    can easily be distributes among many people.
    Probably best for one person or group to work
    on a single \PIPE together.  Don't be 
    intimidated by this.  Just grab a network sniffer
    and do one RPC at a time.

  o design, document, and fix the DEBUG levels 
    in the Samba code.  This is a large, tedious
    project.  All proposals for stratifying the debug
    levels into bitmasks and documenting what should 
    be done at what level should be carried out on 
    samba-technical as we are currently undecided on
    whether this should actually be carried out.

  o Help Tim with back porting the necessary client side 
    RPC's from TNG into HEAD in order to support the new 
    winbind system.  Tim can expand on whether this needs 
    to be done by hand or auto-generated code.

  o Help Chris Hertel with WINS failover implementation
    issues

  o possible password and group backend API redesign.
    This will go hand in hand with the current LDAP
    endeavors.

  o LDAP support to enable Samba to store and access
    user account information in an AD compatible 
    schema.

  o UNICODE support (this is a **big** project)



New project proposals can be voiced on samba-technical.
Thanks for you help.




----------------------------------------------------------------------
   /\  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 )