RFC: reduce number of alias parameters

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Mon, 2017-12-11 at 09:37 -0800, Jeremy Allison via samba-technical
wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 01:27:29PM +0100, David Disseldorp via samba-technical wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 12:20:38 +0100, Björn JACKE via samba-technical wrote:
> > 
> > > I think it's not useful to have a huge number of aliases just to make the
> > > parameters expressable is different humand wordings or spellings. They increase
> > > the code and binary size and more importantly they make config parsing and more
> > > difficult and error prone. For some parameter aliases which are not very
> > > commonly used imho, I'd like to propose to remove them for the next release.
> > 
> > I'd be happy to see most for the aliases go, but would prefer to have
> > them deprecated (with warnings + documentation) for a release first,
> > rather than directly drop them in the next.
> 
> +1 from me. It would be better to deprecate them first, then
> remove on next release. But yeah, they really should go :-).

I think the deprecation period should depend on the implicatons of the
removal.  We know a lot of folks don't upgrade except every 4 releases
or so, when their distribution is upgraded, particularly Debian stable
or Ubuntu LTS (as these allow in-place upgrades).  They also never read
WHATSNEW.txt

So, for example, removing 'debuglevel' has less implications than 'only
guest' in terms of security.

I'm not saying our new rule is 4 releases notice! But where the only
cost is an alias, consider the cost/benefit. 

Thanks,

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