Building VFS modules out of tree

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 10:43:27AM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2014-03-30 at 19:26 -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> >> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> >> > On Sun, 2014-03-30 at 16:48 -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> >>
> >> [Some stuff deleted]
> >>
> >> >> The question then is, for those people who have their own VFS modules
> >> >> and do not want to place them in the Samba source tree, how do they
> >> >> build with waf? How to the gain access to all the configuration stuff
> >> >> and so forth.
> >> >
> >> > I think you would have to patch them or at least the reference to them
> >> > in a matching Samba source tree.
> >>
> >> This is a very much less than ideal situation for many OEMs it seems to me.
> >>
> >> Something that worked very well with Samba 3.5. and 3.6 is that OEMs
> >> who only needed a VFS module or two could use RPMs or other packages
> >> supplied by RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc, and could then add their VFS
> >> module as a separate RPM and could build their VFS module without
> >> modifying the Samba source tree for the main package.
> >
> > How did they do that?  As I see it, they would have needed a built
> > source tree to get the config.h file that was used, and the full source
> > to get at the headers, because we have never published them as public
> > headers.
> 
> You are correct. Samba is the most difficult open source package out
> there. People using it routinely have to jump through about 40 hoops
> and do one hundred back flips to use it. As such that makes my skills
> worth a lot.

Ouch, that's a painful comment from someone who knows :-(.

Richard, how can we fix this ?

Jeremy.