The Wrapper Project

[Andreas Schneider]

On Wednesday 20 November 2013 13:24:59 Michael Adam wrote:
> Hi Andreas,

Hi Michael,

> I am very sorry to join so late, but somehow these discussions
> had slipped my attention during summer. Today we hit this topic
> in a chat, so I read back through the mail thread and would like
> to make a few comments:
> 
> This is really great interesting and useful work you are doing!

thanks.

> I really like the idea of making these wrapper libraries
> generally useful and publish them separately for other projects
> to use for testing in other projects.
> 
> What I don't like at all is the approach to first rip them out
> of the samba tree, work on them completely off-record and then
> change samba to use these augmented external copies once they
> are ready.
> 
> I would have argued that our usual mode for development of
> features should have been applied: prepare stuff in a personal
> samba git repo/branch, present the patches for review, bring
> the changes into samba (so samba uses the new features internally
> as early as possible), have the improved system mature inside
> samba and then make an independent release. Maybe as the very
> last step externalize the source tree.
> 
> ...Just like for talloc, tevent, tdb, ...
> We have recently even decided to not externalize the code
> repositories of these three libraries, even though at least
> some of them can be considured mature enough and all of them
> are released separately and shipped with many linux distros.

As you know I don't agree to have them in the Samba tree but this is a 
different topic.

> I think this approach would also have given you much more and
> earlier feed-back and contributions by samba-developers. And
> I don't buy the argument that externalizing makes it easier
> for others to contribute. I don't believe this.


Your late email shows the opposite, doesn't it?

I don't see the difference looking at series of patches which are on top of 
samba or not.

The point of this work is to make it useful for *others*, the developers 
outside of the Samba aquarium.

Having talloc etc. internal makes it easier or a Samba developer to work on 
Samba and externalizing the wrappers makes it easier for *me* to work them, 
test them isolated and to do marketing for it. I want that they are used by 
other projects.

The projects we keep in the Samba tree aren't very successful even if they are 
amazing technology.
 
> I really think it is a pity that you have chosen to go that
> other path. And we should at least keep a complete copy
> inside samba. (The alternative with git submodules and
> copying the code into the tarballs might work, but in all
> our previous attempts submodules did not work very well
> so we dropped them.)

The wrappers are not finished yet but if you prefer to have a copy of then in 
the Samba tree, I don't see a problem.

For development, marketing and support for *other* projects it makes more 
sense to have each wrapper in a separate git tree.



	-- andreas

-- 
Andreas Schneider                   GPG-ID: CC014E3D
Samba Team                             asn at samba.org
www.samba.org