libmsrpc for Samba 3

[Chris Nicholls]

>Having spent many, many years working with networking protocol software, I
>have encountered and worked with both methods many times.  I refer to the
>Samba 4 method as "control block" in that one passes a control block structure
>to each function rather than numerous parameters.  I have found the control
>block method to be *far* easier to work with.  When I've worked with the
>parameter method, I would often end up putting a comment next to each
>parameter (so that it ends up looking like the control block method anyway)
>just to keep myself sane.  I've found that it's just too hard to keep track of
>what each parameter is otherwise.
>  
>
This 'control block' structure has grown on me since i first looked at 
this thread last night. It definately makes for much more readable code 
and makes it really easy to pass a number of parameters out of a 
function (as a lot of rpc operations seem to do).  The only question I 
have right now is what happens if an application developer forgets to 
initialize a particular in.* member?  Even with error checking on all 
the parameters, in theory something weird can get through but I guess it 
would be quite infrequent for some freak 'valid' value to get in through 
error checking and cause problems.

Overall though, I think i prefer control blocks to the alternative which 
is passing in a ton of paramaters to a function.

I can't really comment on compatabilities with the Samba4 API as i 
haven't spent much time at all looking through the Samba4 code yet.

Chris