[Samba] NEWS : 2.2.3a, Status of the SAMBA_2_2, future plans, etc...

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

Folks,

Greetings. I just wanted to take a few moments a give everyone 
an update on the plans for the 2.2 branch.

First we would like to thank everyone who has provided feedback 
regarding the 2.2.3a release.  The positive feedback has been 
encouraging and the bug reports are proving to be very fruitful.
Jeremy, Herb, and myself are planning on to continue development
on the SAMBA_2_2 cvs tree until we feel confident that it
has stabilized sufficiently to last until we get 3.0 out.
This means that there will be a 2.2.4 release in a within the next 
30 days to address some of the bugs in 2.2.3a such as printer
settings not being saved, documentation updates, et. al.

We have spent a large amount of time on the file serving
capabilities of SAMBA_2_2.  As a result, we have implemented
new functionality present in Win2k SP2 clients, squashed several
pressing oplocks bugs, and improvement performance.  

The set of spoolss rpc's needed for Win NT/2k/XP printing
is continuing to evolve as we understand more of the Windows
NT/2k printing semantics.  We believe that we have made 
some very significant moves forward in correctness.  

For those that have been affected by the bug in 2.2.3a 
which prevented printer settings from being saved on a Samba 
server, a small patch to address this was posted to this 
mailing list last week.  You can read about it here:

	?????????

We would encourage everyone to continue to test the 2.2.3a 
release nd the SAMBA_2_2 cvs tree so we can continue to make 
the progress we have in the past months.  

Once the SAMBA_2_2 tree has stabilized to the point where
we can focus on the HEAD branch, the we will all concentrate 
on the HEAD branch in an effort to finish the list of
features for the 3.0 release.  Some of these include

  * UNICODE support (done)
  * Windows 2000 domain member support using Kerberos and 
    LDAP (done)
  * new authentication backend (done)
  * Windows NT 4.0 style trusts (in progress)
  * Windows NT 4.0 SAM replication (in progress)
  * Publishing printers and share information in Active
    Directory (in progress)
  * Mapping Windows Domain groups to UNIX groups (done)
  * WINS replication (in progress)
  * Improved --with-ldapsam and --with-tdbsam support (in 
    progress)
  * Various printing performance improvements (to be done)
  * Setup and Configuration wizards (to be done)
  * lots of regression testing (in progress and to be done)

Thanks for your help in making SAMBA_2_2 and 3.0 happen.
We will try to continue to post development plans and intentions
periodically.  As a reminder, please subscribe to samba-technical
if you really want to stay up to date on Samba development topics.

Here's to much continued success :-)

ps: There is to ETA for 3.0 (before anyone asks) :-)






cheers, jerry carter
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
 SAMBA Team                                       http://www.samba.org
 --"I never saved anything for the swim back." Ethan Hawk in Gattaca--