Developer Documentation

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Mon Jan 17 11:27:51 GMT 2005


On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 14:16 -0800, Charles N Wyble wrote: 
> Hello Everyone,
> 
>     I have been following the samba technical list for a while (few 
> months) now and have a suggestion. I see quite a few good tidbits every 
> couple days on various portions of the code and good solid discussion 
> quite  a bit on various samba aspects. I would like to propose 
> documenting these items.  It is a shame to have to read the archives and 
> pick out the gems. I enjoy doing it but then thats me :) I imagine most 
> people don't have the time or motivation to do that. I am more then 
> willing to help with the documentation and possibly lead the project. 
> One caveat ..... I am fairly new to samba and so may have a lot of 
> questions bout various aspects of it that I would want to explain in the 
> documentation.  If you can put up with my questions and comments I would 
> be happy to lead this project.

Developer documentation, and more particularly prospective developer
documentation is perhaps one of the bigger 'holes' in the Samba project
at the moment.  Previously this also included the website, but thanks to
the efforts of Deryck Hodge, we now have a very good website, and this
gives me hope that this too can be be fixed.

Many years ago, there was a 'Kernel Cousins Samba' (from Kernel-Traffic)
that did a nice job of covering the samba and samba-technical mailing
lists, and Deryck proposed here only a few months ago that he would like
to see a similar thing revived.  It is not an easy task, particularly
covering both samba-technical and #samba-technical, the IRC channel,
where a lot of particularly Samba4 development takes place.  

We do have a small collection of current Samba4 development
documentation (such as prog_guide.txt, the talloc guide, as well as some
parts of my thesis, vl's and my recent white papers), as well as a large
amount of increasingly out of date docs from Samba3.  Unfortunately,
there isn't a nice big 'this hasn't been looked at for years' marker,
which makes this a bit of a minefield.

The reason that we have got into this state is that developers much
prefer to develop, and there tends to be few who are in the loop enough
to write things down, who don't want to spend time coding instead ;-).  

I do hope you (or others!) can find some way to help digest this, into
something more useful to prospective developers.

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College  http://hawkerc.net
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