Usability of 'samba-tool domain provision'

[Rowland Penny]

On 02/06/16 09:17, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> 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.

Well, in my opinion, that is just wrong, if things cannot change, how do 
we progress ??

> 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.

Your reference to 'smbpasswd' is a bit different, this is, as far as I 
am aware, written in 'C' and then compiled, unlike samba-tool which can 
be examined easily because it is written in 'Python'.

>
> 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.

Ah, but you can hardly call 'realm' & 'domain' rarely used options, in 
fact you cannot provision a domain without them, which is where the 
problem started from :-)

>    
>
>> 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.

These patches don't actually change their behaviour, they just enforce 
that 'realm' & 'domain' are given

> 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
>

Ok, before I alter my patches, can you confirm, it is just the change of 
'realm' & 'domain' from options to args, you are against, or is there 
anything else ?

Rowland