Releasing Samba 4.0 RC1?

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Sun Aug 12 05:59:01 MDT 2012


(TLDR: I want us to think about if we should release Samba 4.0 before or
after SDC and the MS plugfest). 


Over the past couple of months now, I have been releasing a Samba 4.0
beta every two weeks, as we proceed on the path to a release candidate.
Indeed, while I can't find the schedule right now, it called for the
next release (Tuesday Aug 14) to be RC1!

Now that I have your attention, I'm not seriously suggesting pulling an
RC next week, but I do want to discuss what we will do to get to making
an RC of Samba 4.0, and how that might fit into other major development
effort that is ongoing.

The background is that since Beta 2, s3fs has been the default and
hasn't caused major issues.  This was consisdered the single biggest
blocking issue.  That said, I am not totally happy with it, as the ACL
handling needs work: we set ACLs during provision that are sent to the
client, but not actually honoured by Samba.  I'm working to fix this. 

There is of course the series of bugs attached to
https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8622 but sadly most of these
have not seen much attention since being filed (and don't seem to be
bothering our production users). 

That covers the AD side of the house, but clearly there is a massive
development effort ongoing for the SMB3 support.  This is really
important, as it not only emphasises that Samba 4.0 is a major leap
forward across all of our many parts, but it also gives us a chance to
get SMB3 (even without many of the optional features) into the hands of
our users.  

My question on SMB3 is: Are we at or nearing a point in that development
effort where it is logical to pause and release?  

We also still need help with manpages, documentation of new smb.conf
options.  

Finally, this brings us to timing, and the challenges and opportunities
presented by the upcoming SDC event and plugfest at Microsoft.

We could release RC1 before SDC
http://snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/plugfest (starts 16 Sept)
and the Microsoft AD plugfest (ends 28 Sept).  However, then if we find
issues (and that is the express purpose of such events) we will need to
go via the full bug+patch process for all of them.  

Or we could release RC1 after both events, but that starts to be early
October, and that seems like a long delay, and I for one will be pretty
exhausted after jet-lag and 2 weeks of travel, putting any RC1 into mid
October at the earliest.  That in turn makes it harder to get a release
actually made in 2012. 

The other disadvantage is that while conferences are a great goal to aim
at for releases, the quick-and-dirty development style (needed to
isolate issues quickly) may simply mean we either have patches in the
tree that are not totally ready (simply because they were prepared under
pressure) or we have a long delay as we wait for folks to work though
their backlog.

This timing also affects our downstream distributions, so I would
appreciate any views from that direction as well.

Thanks,

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org




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