[PROPOSAL] To retire autoconf for 4.1

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2013-05-21 at 11:31 +0200, Michael Adam wrote:
> Hi Andrew,

> And maybe we can get some voices here of people using
> Samba file servers on various Unixes and of the distributors
> (of Linux, but also BSD flavours maybe).

I can speak to the process of packaging Samba 4.0, on Debian actually.

I've been involved in the effort to produce a Samba 4.0 package, and the
biggest challenge has not been the build system (because it is
still ./configure && make && DESTDIR=/tmp/installroot make install) but
in merging the two packing efforts because of the pre-existing samba4
packages.

There is more work in ensuring all the shared libraries are put into the
right packages (particularly because debian packages try to split things
up), but also great relief that Samba is finally using shared libs, and
is therefore smaller. 

There is also work in adjusting to the slightly altered configure
syntax, but we did a lot of work to ensure options came across from
autoconf for 4.0, and this isn't difficult. 

On the Red Hat side of the fence, I'll let the developers involved speak
for themselves, but we had a flurry of patches before 4.0 specifically
around tweaking the waf build to make it a little easier to package
correctly. 

Andrew Bartlett

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