Eliminating Samba4 (as a name)

[Andrew Bartlett]

Now that Samba 4.0 has been released - a very proud moment for the whole
Samba Team - I want to emphasise something that most of the team has
been trying to do over the past few months, but that we haven't really
announced:

That is, gong forward, we are generally avoiding using the term Samba4
(and Samba3 for that matter). 

The reason is that while these terms were useful for a time before the
merge the originally separate parts of Samba on a technical level, now
they just cause us more confusion, and it is only going to get worse now
we have made a 4.0 production release.

The issue is that Samba 4.0 is a full release of many different Samba
components.  We didn't make a big fuss about the file server changes, as
the biggest changes there are preparation for doing even bigger things
in a future release, but what we have done is release a single Samba
4.0.  Therefore it is confusing for users and developers when questions
are asked about samba4, as while that name generally referred to the AD
DC effort, Samba 4.0 is a full Samba release.

So, in the future, if you wish to talk about the "Samba 4.0 AD DC",
please us that term. 

The same applies to Samba3 as a term referring to the smbd files server,
nmbd, winbindd etc.  It is one thing to discuss the Samba 3.x release
series, but to talk about the Samba3 components of Samba 4.0 is just
confusing.

Towards that, I have tried to stop using the term Samba4 in my mailing
list posts, and to ensure that folks who mention 'samba4' really do mean
the AD DC.  I've started editing the Samba4/HOWTO to remove samba4
references, and I've renamed it to
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_AD_DC_HOWTO

There is still a lot to do, but our users can help this a lot by being
clear when referring to Samba, and not using these terms. 

By doing to, we acknowledge that while the big new feature in the Samba
4.0 release is the AD DC, there is much more in Samba 4.0 besides, and
we can't do that if we confuse fellow users who might equate Samba4 with
Samba 4.0. 

Thanks,

Andrew Bartlett

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