Usability of 'samba-tool domain provision'

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2016-06-02 at 08:56 +0100, Rowland Penny wrote:

> The whole thing that started this was that the NetBIOS domain name 
> didn't have enough 'help', the same went for the realm name, and this
> cannot really be fixed without a total re-write of 'samba-tool'. This
> is 
> because it comes from 'sambaopts'
> 
> Why can't we change the syntax? just because external scripts use 
> samba-tool as it is now, isn't really a good enough reason, do we 
> totally guarantee that samba-tool will never change?

Pretty much.  For this reason we have to be pretty careful about our
choices here, as we end up stuck with them.  See for example
'smbpasswd' which has a totally non-standard (for Samba) syntax.

I'm not saying we have never changed a syntax, but like smb.conf
options changes, it should be a last resort for known to be rarely used
options, and even then because of Samba's wide use, we will always find
someone who depended on it.  

> I seem to remember a similar argument about the 'debug' library and
> this 
> was changed.

Command line tools are an external ABI, and we go to great lengths not
to change their behaviour.  debug is an internal ABI we shared with two
other projects (ctdb and openchange).  To deal with that (and for many
other reasons) we brought ctdb in house, and are still trying to smooth
things over with the openchange effort.

There will be other ways to fix the help, we just can't change the
syntax in this case.

Sorry,

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba