Disabling python modules.

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Thu, 2017-01-05 at 08:59 -0800, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> 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.

As long as that is the rule I don't mind folks cutting out features. 

However they should know we don't promise (within reason) how limited
that feature set is, eg if someone has a burning desire to rewrite one
of the tools as a python wrapper, or write a new tool that way, I would
really not like to hear 'but the embedded vendors...'. 

This may actually make the python3 move easier, as old solaris systems
like the one Volker described recently are really not that different to
embedded systems :-)

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