VFS Support/Viability in the SAMBA Roadmap

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 06:17:14PM +0000, Dutton, Matthew via samba-technical wrote:
> I’m interested in developing a VFS module for exposing a partially database-backed filesystem, similar to the DatabaseFS VFS module.
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> Before I invest significant effort into this, I’d like to know whether the current VFS architecture is considered “supported” and isn’t on the roadmap to be deprecated. I see fairly recent development based on VFS (e.g. for GlusterFS) and some bugs being resolved, but I did not get a definitive answer from what I could find on the roadmap.
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> Are there any plans to substantially change or deprecate the current VFS framework?  Is there a roadmap addressing this that I should RTFM?

VFS interfaces are guaranteed for the lifetime of a major
release (e.g. all 4.7.x releases are guaranteed not to
change the VFS ABI, all 4.6.x releases have the same VFS
ABI etc.).

We'll be extending and making the VFS more async in future
releases (more VFS_XXX_SEND()/VFS_XXX_RECV() pairs) but the
VFS is an integral part of Samba and will remain so for the
entire lifetime of Samba.

Cheers,

	Jeremy.