[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Andrew Bartlett]

G'day,

Michael Adam tells me he raised this in brief at SambaXP, but I wanted
to bring it up here:

As we consider dates for Samba 4.1, I think it's finally time to have
a discussion about removing autoconf.  I know this is controversial in some circles, so
I have avoided starting this discussion for some time.  

Delaying this proposal has been useful, because in the almost 6 months since we
released Samba 4.0, I've seen vanishingly few complaints about our waf
build system.  Indeed, the users who seem to admire it most are those on
the old Solaris systems, because they say it handles the use of
non-system OpenLDAP libs better, and provides a modern kerberos
bundled-in!

I've personally worked with a Solaris 8 site with the (sensible, for a
system of that age) requirement that it not be directly connected to the
internet, and it is from working with that user that the
build_with_python.sh script was improved.

I'm not going to say that waf is perfect - it certainly isn't, but for
Samba 4.1 and beyond, we should focus our energies on a single build
system, and making it better, rather than continuing to build this large
and complex code base with two independent build systems that we have to
keep in sync.

The autoconf build system has supported us for a long time, but just as
it is time that we retire SWAT, Samba 4.1 is the appropriate time to
retire autoconf, and move to a single way to build a unified Samba
project. 

That we are making a Samba 4.1 release without major feature upgrades
makes this a particularly good opportunity, as users who might be
adversely impacted (and not have noticed any of our previous list
announcements, or BUILD_SYSTEMS.txt) will almost certainly be able to
use Samba 4.0 as a fall-back. 

I'm sure many of you will have comments, and I fully acknowledge that
the way waf was brought to Samba was not a pleasant process for any of
us.  I hope that despite that pain we can still make a decision here.

Some background on the long slog to ensure config.h files match can be found in:
https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8969

Thanks,

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