a proposal for Samba 3.5

[Michael Sweet]

Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> ...
>>Also, rpcclient is used by CUPS (among other projects) to install
>>printer drivers for Windows clients; this is very big deal and
>>if rpcclient disappears then we will have to come up with an
>>alternate means of doing this that will also work with Samba
>>3.0 and earlier.
> 
> 
> CUPS should never have used rpcclient like that, nor assumed that our
> internal testing tool would have an interface sufficiently consistent
> for use in the way that cupsaddsmb does.

If it is, in fact, an internal testing tool, then it should be
advertised as such and should *not* be installed along with
smbclient, etc.

Also, we've been using rpcclient to do this since Samba 2.2, and
*no* Samba developer has ever said "don't do that".  In fact, when
I approached you guys about doing the driver export for CUPS, the
only interface available at the time was rpcclient.

> The tool which we provide for that purpose is 'net' - and I think that
> the tasks CUPS needs to perform should be done via a new incarnation of
> that interface.

Since that tool does not exist, and (from what I gather from the
various comments) does not support the necessary functionality,
then I am stumped as to how CUPS could use the "net" utility to
do this right now...

....

Ideally, I would love for cupsaddsmb to be able to link to a
SMB+RPC library provided by Samba so that all of this external
command stuff could go away.  AFAIK, only the SMB client library
is installed in Samba 3.0, and none of the RPC is available
there...

Regardless of the interface, we want a documented and stable
interface we can use to export printer drivers to Windows
clients.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com