[Samba] winbind - not ready for prime time?

[Whit Blauvelt]

What's the consensus? Should winbind even be considered for production use?
Looking back through the archives of the Samba lists, there's a lot of doubt
about it. Where people have had problems, there are more often than not no
solutions given. When I look at the man page in 3.0.28, there are litterally
blank spots awaiting completion, and lack of documentation of
sometimes-essential switches explicitly and obscurely referred to in the
email lists. The "official" manual sections that cover it are tangential and
incomplete. The third-party howtos, when they go farther than the man page,
are sketchy and often just wrong.

Should it have even been released in anything other than a beta package? I
was assuming that anything in the official Samba releases was reasonably
solid - like the core Samba functionality, or the excellent rsync, or the
components of other major OSS packages of similar stature to Samba. 

I've seen a claim that Samba 4 may handle this stuff much better. But if
there are any more releases in the 3 line, should there be prominent
warnings that, due to either flawed design or bad documentation, winbind
should not be counted on for production? In 14 years of administering Linux
systems, I've never seen anything that, given a few days to troubleshoot and
some advice from the lists, I couldn't get humming sweetly. Not winbind.
Either I'm getting too old for this work, or it uniquely fails the usability
test.

Best regards,
Whit