s4member environment and 'useless' tests

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2017-01-10 at 12:18 +0000, Rowland Penny wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jan 2017 12:22:15 +0100
> Andreas Schneider <asn at samba.org> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I'm also waiting for a explanation what a s4member actually is ...
> > 
> > 
> 
> It seems to be a provisioned member server, something the Samba wiki
> forcefully tells you not to do, see here:
> https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_a_Domain_Member#
> Joining_the_Domain
> 
> So, I will ask again, why are we testing against something we tell
> users not to use and is actually broken ???

Because it isn't so broken as to not be worth keeping the code working.

There is a big difference between the set of configurations that we
strongly recommend our users use, and those we may have code for.  We
still have most of the code for the OpenLDAP backend for example, with
even more dire warnings.  You and I have had long and unresolved
discussions about the ntvfs file server in a similar way. 

In this specific case, until recently this code path was important for
the openchange project.  (Openchange sadly is no longer under
development, particularly for the server). 

It also tests, alongside rpc_proxy, the python domain-join code (an
alternative to the C based code in 'net').

I would be much more convinced if the tests of this environment were
blocking code development, or they take a long time, but removing them
*because they found an actual bug* seems a bit strange.

I am happy if s4member and rpc_proxy are combined, but given the
changes I did in da3a79831afbd1b85592be36eb47de375e575643 to make it
work, I'm not sure if the two are compatible.

Andrew Bartlett