Releasing Samba 4.0 RC1?

[Gémes Géza]

Hi,
> (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
>
IMHO the biggest (most probable source for possible user grief) issue is 
s3fs behavior in handling policies. To my experiments (I've just 
switched our production network from 3 to 4 in the weekend) not only 
does it prohibit setting policies initially but after manually given 
full access to Domain Admins, I was able to set up some policies. The 
problem which persist is inability to change the ACLs for policies. I 
think will give ntvfs a try.

Cheers

Geza Gemes