How to move storage OEMs to Samba 4.0 ?

[Volker Lendecke]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 11:37:47AM +0200, Michael Adam wrote:
> As Kai has already pointed out, this is not a new problem:
> We did not have such a discussion when we moved from 3.5 to
> 3.6 and thereby froze 3.5, what makes this fundamentally
> different in the move 3.6 -> 4.0 from the pure file server
> perspective?
> 
> Only the number? Or the build system questions?
> Or some of the architechtural changes under the hood?

All of those together. Even though we used the s3 code base,
I would assert that the change from 3.6 to 4.0 is
significantly larger than most of the releases we did
before.

> I do not see that this situation will be moved to a different level
> with the impending release of 4.0. Jeremy, if you could make this
> more apparent to me, that would really be useful.

It is the sum of changes that went in. gensec,
security=share gone, security=ads requires a more advanced
environment, merged loadparm, possibly ntdb as a new
default. This is enough to scare people away from s4 for the
OEM case for at least 12 months if not much more from now.
I would say that we can't leave those in the cold for so
long. We have a backlog of features that we don't accept
right now, and this will only grow over the next year or
two.

> Instead, if we want to provied a centralized platform for
> backported patches, we could maintain a collection of backported
> patches of some form without a complete release machinery hanging
> off of it. For example, we could create a website with lists of
> patchsets that can be applied to the 3.6 releases.
> If this is too cumbersome we could possibly create one a backport
> branch for 3.6 that is ahead of current v3-6-stable by some
> backported patchsets. Or even create multiple branches for
> different focusses, a branch for each backport topic would at
> least be thinkable. (This would be similar to the clustering
> branches v3-6-ctdb.)

I think this in effect is 3.7. Why not call it what it is?

Volker

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