ntdb in Samba?

[Rusty Russell]

Volker Lendecke <Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE> writes:
> Hi, Rusty!
>
> ntdb gives quite some warnings/errors in the Coverity scan I've recently
> started looking at again.
>
> Is it worthwhile fixing those, i.e. can we expect development in ntdb
> any time soon?

I think it's dead.

Originally it was a replacement which handle tdb too, with a new API.
But then the Samba Team consensus was that Samba already had a dbwrap
layer which could handle both, so we should use that instead.

So I threw away that (already-completed) NTDB work, and then discovered
that dbwrap in Samba didn't cover many uses of TDB.  So, now my job was
to rework some of the oldest and crustiest parts of Samba.  Plus enhance
dbwrap, since it wasn't a complete abstraction.

Meanwhile, nobody actually needs > 4GB tdbs.  And the hacky garbage
collection tdb uses is sufficient in practice.  And there's been
excellent scalability work done in TDB itself, which hasn't been
mirrored in ntdb.

And while the ntdb API is much nicer than the tdb API, that's not
very helpful since Samba needs to support both.  And since ntdb can
no longer handle tdb files, it's not useful for non-Samba projects
unless they're completely new code.

And to be honest, NTDB is technologically an incremental, not
revolutionary enhancement.  Without the benefit of years of testing
which TDB has.

Cheers,
Rusty.