Disabling python modules.

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 02:42:04PM +1300, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-01-04 at 17:15 -0800, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > It looks like Gentoo Linux have done some work to
> > allow both ldb and samba to build without python:
> > 
> > https://dev.gentoo.org/~polynomial-c/samba-disable-python-patches-4.5
> > .0_rc1.tar.xz
> > 
> > Do we want to persue this and add to the build
> > system as an option ? I think there are several
> > embedded vendors who might like this option.
> 
> My primary concern here is that I think we should be trying to write
> less C, rather than more, and so if we start to officially support
> building without python, we create another reason not to write more of
> our tools in python. 
> 
> I realise that Python hasn't really caught on outside the AD DC, as I
> had really hoped it would become Samba's standard scripting language
> for building tools etc.  Even so it would be quite unfortunate to imply
> a policy that certain parts of samba must be implemented in C.  (I've
> not used it, but from what I hear about it some rust might be quite
> helpful).
> 
> That said, I get that embedded vendors would like one less dependency,
> particularly where they simply don't use the things we build with/for
> python.

That's the key. Embedded vendors wanting only smbd or the client
libsmb or net tools simply don't need the python modules, and it makes buiding
Samba on these systems really hard (to the point where some give up
and use alternatives, and we really don't want to see that :-).

I don't think allowing these fixes will have any effect on how
we use python for our "full" installations (tooling etc.) - after
all our build system is python so it's not like we're going to
reduce use of it.

I'll try and find out the ownership of these patches and see if
we can get them in a shape to merge.