Name Change for Samba4? [Re: What is blocking a Samba4 Tech Preview?]

[tridge at samba.org]

Jeremy,

 > The trouble is that Samba4 is different in more than just a code
 > evolution, as 2.0 was different from 1.0.

I think you may be mis-remembering, Samba 1.0 had a total of 2481
lines of code. There is a _lot_ more code common between Samba 3.0 and
Samba 4.0 than there was between Samba 1.0 and Samba 2.0 (both in
percentage and absolute terms)

I also strongly suspect (tho I haven't confirmed this) that there is a
lot more common code between Samba 3.0 and Samba 4.0 than there was
between Samba 2.0 and Samba 3.0. Just look at the raw numbers - Samba
3.0 is more than 3x larger than Samba 2.0 in code size so at minimum
its 2/3 different.

 > It's a complete rewrite will little original code left. It's still
 > Samba, but scientific classification terms it's the same family,
 > but a different genus.  That's why IMHO it makes sense for the
 > pacakge name to be different.

Comparing lines of code is not a good criterion, as you can see from
the above.

I suspect the real reason you are inclined to suggest a new package
name is that you want to continue work on Samba 3.x and you don't want
Samba 4.0 "getting in the way" of that. I can understand that. On the
other hand, I consider Samba 4.0 to be the natural next step for
Samba, and I certainly don't consider it to be a "new project"
requiring a new name.

The idea of calling it "Samba4 1.0" is a non-starter. That would be a
really confusing version number system, particularly for future
versions. 

I think that following our existing version numbering system where we
change the major number of the version for really large changes (just
as we did for Samba 1.0 to 2.0, and 2.0 to 3.0) is the way to go, but
continue to maintain/improve our older versions as long as there are
people interested in doing so. We clearly do have plenty of people
interested in maintaining/improving Samba 3.x, so I don't expect it to
die off any time soon.

What the Linux distros do is up to them. In the case of apache many
distros have a separate "apache" and "apache2" package, and that
certainly makes life a lot easier for administrators who want to
specifically use one or the other. I would not be surprised if the
distros do something very similar with Samba 3.x and Samba 4.x. I
don't think we should force this on them though, and I think that when
Samba 4.0 is eventually release it should be called samba-4.0.tar.gz
on the samba.org download, just like our previous major releases.

Cheers, Tridge