[Samba] Re: winbind - not ready for prime time

[Whit Blauvelt]

Gee thanks, Jeremy, for a personal attack rather than addressing any of the
specifics raised. I'm not looking for a flame war. I'm looking for some
recognition that the Samba project may have gone astray in the decision to
package winbind as part of the main package, given the many specific
shortcomings - which will be obvious if you spend a few days, as I just
have, going back through all the many reports from the field in these lists.
If a core OSS project like Samba isn't ready to support an auxillary program
like winbind by keeping its documentation up to date and by creating enough
of a community around it to actually answer problem reports made to this
list, it should at least warn "Winbind is beta software, largely
undocumented and unsupported by the Samba project and community."

My ethic has always been: If there's a rock in the path, I remove it so the
next person along doesn't trip over it. If something's clearly not
documented, or not performing according to common sense expectations and a
fair reading of the documentation as it stands, and it's raised in the main
list for the project, it should be addressed by someone from the project
both on the list, and through improvements in the documentation.

Take a look at the documentation around any other major package: Apache,
Sendmail, Bind, Postfix, Perl, PHP, MySQL, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Netfilter ...
all of it is in far better shape Samba's, and most of these are more complex
projects. I've seen comments from some of the Samba developers (not Tridge!)
that they prefer it if Samba bites sysadmins who do things "wrong," rather
than handle system variations gracefully. Well, if that's going to be the
attitude, but the "right" way is only half-specified, there's a problem.

Regards,
Whit

On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 10:39:17AM -0800, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2008 at 11:15:32AM -0500, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
> 
> > Either I'm getting too old for this work, or it uniquely fails the usability
> > test.
> 
> You're getting too old for this work....
> 
> Jeremy.