Removing the developers guide

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 11:37:33AM +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-08-20 at 19:13 +0200, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > The developers guide seems to be fairly outdated at this point; it hasn't been
> > updated in the last 10 years or so and its contents have little usefulness at
> > best. Would anybody object to its removal?
> 
> Much of what is in there still looks valid, except particularly the
> first chapter (on NT domain stuff better described in the WSPP docs). 
> 
> But the only way to tell if a bit of advise is out of date or not is to
> already know the answer, a new developer would be overwhelmed, and the
> rest of us just never read it.
> 
> I'm really not sure what to do with the rest.

A quick look shows that we should at least eliminate a large chunk of the
developers guide. I think we should keep the rest around, but 
a different format - one that is more easily editable by us - might be
more appropriate. Perhaps just plain text files or restructuredText under
devdocs/?

Part 1: The protocol

NetBIOS in a Unix World - better covered in the WSPP docs and Chris' book.
NT Domain RPCs - mostly just an enumeration of the fields in various RPC
		 calls and structures from before the IDL days. Also
		 better covered in the WSPP docs

I don't think Part 1 is worth keeping around.

Part 2: Samba Basics

Samba Architecture (from '97) - explains some of the original decisions
  behind the design of nmbd and smbd. Has some outdated and exaggerated
  arguments about why nmbd and smbd are not threaded.

  I think this one should be removed.

The Samba DEBUG system - outdated but still useful. Perhaps this can
  just be merged into the preamble for debug.h ?

Samba Internals - This is mostly about string and int conversion.
  The int conversion seems to be covered equally well in byteorder.h
  itself.

  The string conversion comments are mostly still relevant, but refer to
  legacy behaviour from before 2000 and don't cover some of the newer
  conversion functions.

  I think this would be confusing if we kept it around as is. Remove.

Coding Suggestions - Out of date; read the style guide and general
  advice on contributing to FOSS instead. Remove.

Modules - Out of date. Remove.

Part 3: Samba Subsystems

RPC Pluggable Modules - No longer accurate. Remove.

VFS modules - No idea. Considering the VFS layer has changed quite a few
   times since 2002 I'm going to guess it's out of date. 

The smb.conf file - Some short notes on the behaviour of the params.c.
   Perhaps just fold this into the preamble of params.c?

Samba WINS internals - Short, not really internals, mostly comments on WINS
   parameters and configuration. Remove.

LanMan and NT Password Encryption - Somewhat out of date but still useful.
   Perhaps convert to a txt file?

Part 4: Debugging and tracing

Tracing samba system calls - These are just general hints on using strace, not
	Samba specific. This is well enough covered in other tutorials on
        the web. Remove.
Samba printing internals - Last updated in 2002. Still relevant?

Part 5: Appendices:

Notes to Packagers - Short and mostly outdated. The notes on versioning
   should probably be moved elsewhere where packagers can more easily find it.
   README.packaging?

Cheers,

Jelmer