Proposal: Split libtalloc, libtdb, libtevent and libldb into a separate upstream project

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 01/07/2011 04:58 PM, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> We can of course discuss releasing these packages more often, but it's
> actually the devolution of the maintainer-ship that has made this more
> difficult.  When I last discussed this with Jelmer (Samba4 release
> manager), he didn't feel comfortable blessing a tdb release for each
> Samba4 alpha release, as he isn't the tdb maintainer (that's rusty's
> job).  But at the same time, we have enough trouble getting Samba alpha
> releases made, that he didn't fancy getting the prerequisite packages
> released by their maintainers first.  The same would apply for ldb and
> talloc etc. 
> 
> Finally, you suggest that the SSSD team could assist with ldb
> development.  We would of course welcome your assistance.  We also
> appreciate you raising this issue, it is important to understand what
> our library users need, and hope we can find a mutually satisfactory
> improvement to our processes. 


Sorry, I disappeared for the weekend before replying to my original
email with a summary of some of the topics that were discussed in
#samba-technical on Friday as well.

First, a little bit of background. Simo and I had been working on Friday
to identify the source of a serious performance bug in SSSD. While we
were profiling the code, it became apparent that we were seeing very
slow performance because all of the libtdb actions inside libldb were
performing a full traverse instead of an indexed search. Simo told me
that newer versions of libldb have support for a debugging mode that
will tell you when a command is going to run a search without indexing,
so we were trying to get that compiled to use.

The difficulties we had with getting these new versions in place (which
we never managed as of Friday) brought up a discussion about how all of
these libraries have seen ample development in the last year, but have
still not seen a public tarball release in a very long time. Libldb in
particular has NEVER had an independent upstream tarball release. We've
had to extract it from the public alpha releases of Samba 4 in order to
use it with SSSD. Currently, the most recent version of libldb available
in a released tarball is 0.9.10, while the upstream version is 0.9.22.

This brought me to suggest that perhaps we should start working towards
making these libraries more readily available. My original thought was
that, since these libraries now form the core of more than one large
project, it would be mutually beneficial for us to turn them into their
own upstreams.

We had a long discussion in #samba-technical on Friday where we weighed
the pros and cons of this, as well as some related matters: the bundling
of dependent libraries in the Samba tarballs and more regular releases
of these libraries. The individuals most involved in this discussion
were jelmer, vl and metze, along with Simo and myself.

At the conclusion of the discussion, I believe we came up with a mutual
agreement that the best way forwards would be this:


1) Libtalloc, libtdb, libtevent and libldb should see upstream tarball
releases on a much faster basis. I will be discussing with my management
at Red Hat whether I can volunteer to take this responsibility on.

2) As an addendum to the above, we should look into automating the
release process for these libraries, based on changes to the version
variable in the wscript file.

3) Include git tags for each of these library releases, instead of only
for samba releases.

4) We should change the default behavior of configuration of the sources
to be --bundled-libraries=NONE instead of --bundled-libraries=AUTO. This
is a tangentially-related topic that would make things simpler for
distribution packagers.




- -- 
Stephen Gallagher
RHCE 804006346421761

Delivering value year after year.
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