transitioning release management

Derrell Lipman derrell.lipman at unwireduniverse.com
Wed Feb 27 14:05:35 GMT 2008


On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 5:24 AM, Karolin Seeger <ks at sernet.de> wrote:
>
>  I would like to do this merge as soon as possible.
>
>  Would it make sense to merge maybe today or tomorrow, do some basic
>  testing (builds, ...) and then release a 3.2.0pre2 next week?
>
>  Is there anything I can prepare now (despite of bugzilla ;-)?

The recent changes I made to libsmbclient to add ftruncate
functionality, the changes that mimir is requesting for some "native"
capability for use in conjunction with libsmbclient, and my long-term
desire to be able to migrate the command line tools to using
libsmbclient all lead me to propose that libsmbclient is in need of
breaking ABI compatibility and some minor API changes that will affect
some users.  The current API provides a structure accessible to the
user which must remain forever unchanged (except by appending to its
tail), meaning that adding functionality lessens code readability and
proper organization.  I'd like to modify the interface to make it much
easier to add functionality without breaking future ABI compatibility
nor making the code more difficult to read.

There doesn't seem to be a more appropriate time to do this than with
the jump from 3.0 to 3.2.  The next most appropriate time is likely to
be a Samba4 release, and libsmbclient for Samba4 is a significant
undertaking.

I'd like opinions on whether it's reasonable to break ABI
compatibility and cause some (likely small) number of users to have a
few code changes due to API changes in order to provide a better code
base now, during this major version transition.  If the concensus is
that this is a good time to do this, I'll work on it immediately.

Thanks,

Derrell


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