How to move storage OEMs to Samba 4.0 ?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2012-06-12 at 08:33 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:

> > * What do the OEMs themselves want from us?
> >   Do they want a blended OEM-feature release?
> 
> They want all new features in no new release of course :-).
> Which is impossible :-).

Indeed.  So why are you proposing anything like it?  Perhaps I'm missing
something:  What do we gain at a team by even attempting part of this
impossible feat?

Everything we do and every choice we make has costs and benefits - we
have talked about the costs (and I do again below), but what is the
benefits?

That is, I know the OEMs will like it, and the OEMs are important, but
what is the benefit to the team in shifting the maintenance cost from
them to us?

> So again, as everyone seemed to ignore it. I really like Ira's
> suggestion.
> 
> Anyone can submit a "new feature" patch for 3.6.next, under
> the following conditions.
> 
> 3 engineers must review and buy-off on the changes, not
> two. At least 2 of the engineers must be from different
> organizations (i.e. No all-Sernet, all-Google, or all-IBM
> patches).
> 
> Does that help ? I think it strikes the right balance
> of opening up the tree a little bit, without having
> a new "3.6.next is open for everything" policy.

No, I don't think it helps, and I think it didn't get a positive
response because it fails to address the fundamental issues:  

 - I really think you need to address Kai's point that we can't manage
timely 3.6 releases at the moment, under current rules.  We may wish all
sorts of things, but until we can keep our current promises to our
users, it seems completely folly to make even bolder promises. 

Perhaps we can come back to talking about this once we have made a
series of timely 3.6 releases with just bug fixes?

 - Just broadening the review process as and of itself doesn't to me
address Björn's point that our 'QA' or review process hasn't been enough
to avoid regressions even with just bugfixes.

 - That Kai's 3) (the currently agreed policy) was a compromise born out
of painful history where we allowed this kind of thing in the past. 

I don't think we can safely change policy until we address all of the
above, and that doing so will just delay further the already delayed 3.6
release stream. 

Andrew Bartlett

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