a proposal for Samba 3.5

[Michael Sweet]

tridge at samba.org wrote:
> Kurt,
> 
>  > Even if "net" was/became a full replacement of rpcclient, the removal
>  > of rpcclient would break a lot of existing (CUPS) installations, if
>  > Samba was upgraded.
> 
> There is no reason why an old rpcclient from Samba3.0 could not be
> kept around on older CUPS systems. As it is a standalone tool it could
> be installed in parallel with any future version of Samba. To achieve
> this the distributions would need to do some work to get dependencies
> (and possibly package splitting) right.
> 
> What we are telling you is that in a future version of Samba the
> current rpcclient tool will go away. The tool is too fundamentally
> broken in design (both interface and internally) to survive.
> 
> Before that happens we need to find out exactly what capabilities of
> rpcclient CUPS uses so we can provide substitute sub-commands in the
> net utility. Then CUPS will need to be changed to use the new net
> interface, and fall back to rpcclient if the new interface is not
> present. If someone wants to do a (scripted or otherwise) wrapper to
> make this easier then thats fine too.

We use adddriver and setdriver with rpcclient; we also use smbclient
to upload the driver files prior to doing these RPC calls.

FWIW, I would much rather have a library to link to rather than
calling external programs - that eliminates potential password
exposures and is much cleaner, IMHO.

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