Printing and smbd -i

[simo]

Hello all,

One of the goals we have for the printing subsystem is to be able to
completely disable it (to the point of not even compiling it in in order
to further reduce size of binaries for embedded devices).

In order to do that we started building a spoolssd daemon that is forked
off smbd early on. This daemon also takes care of starting the
background queue process, and all internal calls to the printing
subsystem have been changed to use the rpc protocol (short-circuited
when spoolssd is not configured to run).

One of the final steps is to move some of the stuff that should have
been done in the background queue process but were recently put into the
main smbd process instead by David Disseldorp.

The 'problem' here is that the background queue process is not started
when smbd is run in interactive mode, which would make printing
unavailable when smbd is run in that mode.

I think the goal of making the printing susbsystem more independent and
pluggable is more important, so I would like to know if always forking
the background queue process even when the -i switch is provide is a
good enough compromise. Same fate for spoolssd, if you configured it to
be used it would be forked even in the smbd -i case.

If there are no strong objections I'll proceed this way, if you have
objection though, please give me alternatives, as doing nothing is not
an option I am willing to accept.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>