the sorry saga of the talloc soname 'fix'

tridge at samba.org tridge at samba.org
Sun Jul 5 01:32:51 GMT 2009


Hi Jeremy,

 > Tridge, I don't think this has overridden you as
 > the talloc library maintainer

I explicity said I didn't want this approach taken. Simo put the patch
it anyway and then you and others cheered. 

When the maintainer doesn't want a particular change then you have 3
choices:

  1) convince them to change their mind

  2) fork

  3) stage a coup and overthrow the maintainer

It is _not_ an option just to push the patch anyway and ignore the
maintainers wishes. 

If this had been an uncontentious bug fix and I had not explicitly
stated that I didn't want this approach taken then it would have been
fine. As it is, you and Simo chose to override the maintainer. That
should not happen.

 > - this thing is your baby and you make the technical decisions on
 > how it works.  If you say the right technical bugfix is to require
 > us to break the ABI, we break the ABI and deal with it, no
 > question.

yes, that or you convince me I am wrong.

 > Simo is representing Red Hat as the packaging maintainer
 > of the libraries they ship in a distro. If he says doing it
 > this way to maintain the ABI will cause less problems for them
 > and for users of the library, then I would believe him and
 > back him on this.

As you say, he is the RedHat maintainer. That means he gets to say
what is in the RedHat package. That doesn't give him the right to
force upstream to follow his approach.

He would certainly have been well within his rights to have a patch as
part of the RedHat package that changed how talloc behaves if he
failed to convince me to make a change and he thought he had no choice.

 > As Rodney King said, "Can't we all just get along ?" :-).

we can get along with talloc embedded in the Samba tree if we follow
the norms of developer behaviour within the team.

Metze did absolutely the right thing with his patch for this. He
argued for the change, and offered me a patch in his own tree that he
suggested I put in.

Simo suggested a change, I said I didn't want that change and he put
it in anyway. What then really pissed me off was all the cheering for
this flagrant disregard for the normal flow of free software
development.

I want to keep the libraries I maintain mastered within the Samba git
tree as I think that is of great benefit to Samba. We won't be able to
do that if other team members push changes into those libraries when I
have asked them not to.

Cheers, Tridge


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