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

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 20:19 +1100, tridge at samba.org wrote:
> Volker,
> 
>  > I just wanted to point out a different metric about the user-visible changes.
>  > Lines of code is one, number of changed, added or removed parameters is
>  > another. And 'valid users' is just a quite prominent example I think.
> 
> quite true, but the major number of Samba (and many other software
> packages) is reserved for 'big, user-visible changes'. That's why we
> are calling it Samba 4.0 not Samba 3.1. The first digit changing means
> "beware! big changes have happened!".
> 
> While developing Samba4 we have removed many of the smb.conf options
> in Samba 3.x. This isn't because we don't want those options in Samba
> 4.0, it is just because the underlying region of code that implements
> those options has dissappeared, so the option disappeared with it. One
> of the things we need to do for the 4.0 release is to make a list of
> what options have been removed and decide on a case by case basis if
> the option should be re-implemented or discarded.
> 
> Personally I think that 'valid users' should be kept, but I will be
> interested in hearing from Simo on that. Perhaps he can convince me it
> should not be re-implemented.

We had a brief discussion on IRC. I want to clarify my idea.

I do not want to see the functionality of "valid users" to disappear,
but I'd like to remove as much duplicate conf paths as possible.
For example the functionality of valid users is duplicated in the share
acls code (not perfectly but that's no the point).

The full idea was to put all shares configuration in an ldb as that
would make it really easy to manage shares from network or local
configuration programs (by direct access to the ldb or through a very
easy to build configuration API).
I understand this is not a much accepted idea, so after some thoughts I
think we can make everyone happy by adding a pluggable configuration
system.
The idea is to abstract configuration retrieval and then have an
smb.conf/ldb/ldap etc.. set of modules that implement the configuration
storage.
This way we can have the same kind of flexibility we had in samba3 wrt
user accounts with the smbpasswd/tdbsam/ldapsam/etc... set of modules.

I think I will dedicate some time to this project developing it in a
separate tmp branch after I am finished with ldap controls early next
year.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce    -  idra at samba.org
Samba Team    -  http://www.samba.org
Italian Site  -  http://samba.xsec.it