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

[tridge at samba.org]

Simo,

I certainly like the idea of promoting these components of Samba more
outside of the Samba project, which is why I created
http://ldb.samba.org and http://talloc.samba.org, and I'd like to see
much more done like this.

My only concerns on how we do this are purely practical
ones. Specifically:

 - it may (will?) break the build farm, at least how the farm is
   currently structured. Maybe svn:externals could solve this? I'm not
   sure. If not then we would need a bit of work in the farm
   scripts. Shouldn't be really tricky though.

 - I seem to remember some problem with svn:externals and ethereal
   sharing pidl. Am I remembering that correctly? Was this solved?

 - actually having the exact same source repository for some libs
   between Samba3 and Samba4 might prove problematic, as it means that
   checkins in one tree could break the other, so it raises the burden
   of testing. With the manual merge we have the opportunity to
   identify these things and fix them.

The 3rd problem might not be significant for talloc, which has a
pretty well defined API by now, but it could well be tricky for
tdb. We have historically done quite a few hackish things (such as the
alarm timelimit code) in tdb that could well break the other tree.

I'm guessing that Jeremy and Jerry would prefer to have their own copy
of talloc and tdb rather than automatically get any changes made by me
and others. If I'm wrong about that then please speak up :-)

 > - 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

I agree that making it easier is good, but they don't have to actually
install Samba now. The ldb and talloc web sites suggest how to grab
just the bits needed. Not as neat as it could be, but doesn't require
all of Samba :-)

I think that we should have official releases of these packages
though. So it would be good if users could download ldb-1.0.tar.gz
somewhere, and talloc-1.0.tar.gz. Even better if the distros pick
these up.

 > - More testing/development coming from other projects

very welcome :)

 > - 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

that might be trickier. I suspect a manual step will still be needed.

 > - 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.

yes, you're right that the tdb and talloc APIs are less prone to
change now than ldb. I'm hoping the ldb api will stabilise soon too,
but you keep coming up with cool stuff to add so maybe thats overly
optimistic :-)

Cheers, Tridge