external libs and tools we depend on

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2019-12-13 at 17:30 +0100, Andreas Schneider wrote:
> On Friday, 13 December 2019 16:27:52 CET Christopher O Cowan - 
> Christopher.O.Cowan--- via samba-technical wrote:
> > I should probably mention that I needed to port jansson and cmocka
> > to AIX.  
> > (Also needed  a current cmake in order to build cmocka).    I
> > believe you
> > can disable the former using --without-json, but I see no mention
> > of cmocka
> > in your dependency list.    I haven't check lately to see when and
> > where
> > it's required.   Is it only developer mode?   
> 
>  
> cmocka is required to build our unit tests. Also there are lot of
> projects 
> using cmocka in the meantime. I think we always build the tests, so
> you can't 
> turn them off.

I did recently merge a patch to put our tests behind --enable-selftest
(implied by --enable-developer) for the main Samba build.  We could
extend this to the libraries too with a little more work, which would
be a safe way to avoid the cmocka dep.

On the flip side JSON is becoming an increasingly important way to
express data for use by/consumption from external tools, so while
currently optional long-term I would expect we will increasingly rely
on jansson in the future.

We recently added zlib to the list of things we depend on BTW.

We do recognise that this change in approach from 'depend on nothing,
vendor what we do depend on' to 'depend on more, vendor less' is hard
on our users, but we are trying to focus our development effort on
Samba and not reimplementation of already established libraries. 

It is ironic, to me, that much of the rest of the industry has already
moved on to 'depend on everything, vendor everything', but Samba is
always a little slow to move to the latest thing :-)

I've updated the wiki page, but it needs much more TLC.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          
https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba