Disabling Python Modules

[Ian Stakenvicius]

On Thu Jan 05 16:59:44 UTC 2017, 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.
> 
> I'll try and find out the ownership of these patches and see if
> we can get them in a shape to merge.


I'm the original author for the vast majority of that patchset; i
definitely give permission for inclusion of them in samba and would be
happy to work with you all to get the portions applied that are
appropriate.

FYI, what the patchset was developed for in particular was so that on
multilib (x86_64 systems that also have 32bit apps and libs) gentoo is
able to build and install as much of samba as possible for 32bit
without needing to have a 32bit python environment installed.  The
patchset as a whole definitely does not provide any sort of working
samba install, nor likely should it.

I'll work on separating things out into appropriate segments, and
getting the patches into git locally so they can be committed as-is
later on.

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