Printing and smbd -i

[Matthieu Patou]

Hello Simo,
On 30/06/2011 15:45, simo wrote:
> 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.
And what about smdb -i that would create only 1 process for print server 
so that it wouldn't be too complicated to debug the print server if needed ?

Also how do you think this integrate with the vision of a unified samba 
4.0 where as kai noted samba -i -M single starts 1 process that don't 
exit after the first served request.

Matthieu.

-- 
Matthieu Patou
Samba Team        http://samba.org
Private repo      http://git.samba.org/?p=mat/samba.git;a=summary