Moving basic libs to a new repo and release them as a separate package

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 02:55:24PM -0500, simo wrote:
> 
> In the Samba Project we created a number of tools that are not only very
> useful and shared between our branches, but also interesting for other
> projects.
> 
> I would like to propose we move the current ldb, tdb and talloc
> libraries to a new branch named samba-base-libs or something like that
> and release them as .so/.a libraries. Then make our Samba trees check
> for them to be installed on the system and require them to build and run
> them.
> 
> Being a separate project I see some advantages:
> - Other projects will find it easier to adopt the software as they will
>   find it easier to provide it to their user in a tiny package without
>   requiring them to install samba
> - More testing/development coming from other projects
> - Better sharing inside the various team trees, fixes flows into the
>   separate libraries and we do not risk to miss fixes from one branch
>   to the other
> - Stabilization of the interfaces
> 
> I think tdb and talloc are mature good candidates, ldb is still under
> being actively worked on but there is a lot of interest in it outside
> the samba team so providing it as a separate tool even in beta stages
> seem good thing to me.
> 
> I'd like comments on this proposal, from all the interested parties.

Seems like a good idea to me - although the devil is in the details :-).
How do you propose we migrate to this from where we are now ? We need
to make this as easy as possible for people to checkout a buildable
Samba tree to help encourage development.

I don't want to become the GNOME or OpenOffice model where even to develop
anything you get stuck in dependency hell (yes, this is a joke, I don't
think we could get as bad as they are without actually attempting to do
so :-) :-).

Jeremy.