proposal: merge waf build of s4 to master

[Matthieu Patou]

Hi Volker,

First as a developer this waf stuff is really good, the configure is 
much more quicker, no need to make clean, no need to wait for the perl 
compilation of the build rules (well it's only s4 so you might not be so 
much concerned). I'm pretty sure that you will appreciate when you need 
to go in S4 as the current build system make you shout more than once.


>> Would it be acceptable if a script built a local copy of python, then
>> built the Samba project?  We have seen that this can be automated (we do
>> so on the build farm already), and it need have no impact on the rest of
>> the system.
>> Perhaps it would help to better understand the use case where this would
>> be a problem.  Could it be solved if we also signed and shipped a
>> tarball including python and the scripts to build the whole collection?
>>
>> My concern is that this is a rather stronger condition than I understood
>> from your suggestion earlier in
>> http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2010-March/070105.html
>> and I want to understand better what a build system would need to do,
>> while still meeting your needs.
>>      
> My requirement is very simple:
>
> Go to an arbitrary default Solaris/AIX/Whatever box (Solaris
> is most popular for me), download samba-latest.tar.gz, type
> in ./configure;make and get a (possibly not fancy) smbd.
>
>    
You talk in other email about customer with big Spac Gear not running 
opensolaris. You are most probably right, although as far as I 
understand sun/oracle sync time to times the development of opensolaris 
with solaris 10 to produce new release so it might be probable that 
recent version of solaris already embed python on this big gear.

Although I don't really know your customers, I've been working for 
several years for a French car maker which had a lot of HP, Sun, IBM 
unix servers and we used to have this big gear not for file server (we 
used wintel instead) but more for SAP or big Oracle Database or other 
big stuff as CRM or EAI.

Then when you bought this kind of computer you also bought support and I 
doubt that sun/hp/ibm/ will support you samba-latest that you built on 
your own on your server. Then people who spend hundreds of thousand 
dollars are doing so because it's their way to reduce the risk on their 
IT infrastructure so they are not going from one side spend so much to 
have some kind of security and in the other side build them self 
binaries for samba and be mostly on their own if a problem occur (I mean 
that their support will be research in the code + on internet + mailing 
list, it's much less comfortable than opening a trouble ticket at 
sun/oracle and saying to them well I bought that much of 
software/hardware please now fix this problem).
If for some reason they are really willing to run a very recent samba on 
such expensive server (well much more than a Intel/AMD one) then I'm 
pretty sure that they will go for some company like SerNet to provide 
them with support (and most probably package build for their system/os).

Also you have to think that system administrator are not loving to take 
too much risk, so they usually prefer to stick to the package shipped 
with their distribution/release/version rather than build their own. I'm 
also like this that why most of things we use in my company is packaged 
by a distributor, we are using non packaged software as less as we can 
and I'll be much more happy when my samba 3 servers will not need a 
version built from scratch.

For the rest that are willing to built samba from the source I think 
that they can also build python from scratch or use a third party 
package (because in any case they will be on their own with their 
version of samba).

All I said is based only on my experience I might be wrong (although I 
don't think so), maybe you can provide some figures to have a better 
idea of the customers that might be impacted (by taking the customers of 
Sernet as a representative sample of corporate users of samba). It would 
also be interesting to have the feedback of some other company (I know 
that a guy from Arcelor/Mittal is on the list) to have their feeling.

Matthieu.