proposal: merge waf build of s4 to master

[Volker Lendecke]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 11:45:41PM +0400, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> 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.

When do people call SerNet? It is often because the default
SUN/HP/IBM install just does not do the job. For example
3.0.x is pretty unhappy talking to W2K8R2 these days.
Shutting down the CIFS service on big machines until
SUN/HP/IBM package a new Samba often is just no option.
Installing the compiler, Kerberos and OpenLDAP libs is
enough of pain, adding python just makes those emergency
support cases more difficult than necessary. I can tell you
stories that we recently have seen in customer cases how
difficult it can be to transfer just a single file into a
restricted, firewalled environment. This can literally take
hours. It is not a simple rsync from samba.org in many
cases. And if you're under pressure because 2000 people have
been sent home because your fucking samba build does not
work every single additional package is a huge PITA.

Why putting that burden on our users for limited benefit?

Volker
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