Releasing Samba 4.0 RC1?

[Matthieu Patou]

On 08/12/2012 04:59 AM, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> (TLDR: I want us to think about if we should release Samba 4.0 before or
> after SDC and the MS plugfest).
>
>
> Over the past couple of months now, I have been releasing a Samba 4.0
> beta every two weeks, as we proceed on the path to a release candidate.
> Indeed, while I can't find the schedule right now, it called for the
> next release (Tuesday Aug 14) to be RC1!
>
> Now that I have your attention, I'm not seriously suggesting pulling an
> RC next week, but I do want to discuss what we will do to get to making
> an RC of Samba 4.0, and how that might fit into other major development
> effort that is ongoing.
>
> The background is that since Beta 2, s3fs has been the default and
> hasn't caused major issues.  This was consisdered the single biggest
> blocking issue.  That said, I am not totally happy with it, as the ACL
> handling needs work: we set ACLs during provision that are sent to the
> client, but not actually honoured by Samba.  I'm working to fix this.
>
> There is of course the series of bugs attached to
> https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8622 but sadly most of these
> have not seen much attention since being filed (and don't seem to be
> bothering our production users).
>
> That covers the AD side of the house, but clearly there is a massive
> development effort ongoing for the SMB3 support.  This is really
> important, as it not only emphasises that Samba 4.0 is a major leap
> forward across all of our many parts, but it also gives us a chance to
> get SMB3 (even without many of the optional features) into the hands of
> our users.
>
> My question on SMB3 is: Are we at or nearing a point in that development
> effort where it is logical to pause and release?
>
> We also still need help with manpages, documentation of new smb.conf
> options.
>
> Finally, this brings us to timing, and the challenges and opportunities
> presented by the upcoming SDC event and plugfest at Microsoft.
>
> We could release RC1 before SDC
> http://snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/plugfest (starts 16 Sept)
> and the Microsoft AD plugfest (ends 28 Sept).  However, then if we find
> issues (and that is the express purpose of such events) we will need to
> go via the full bug+patch process for all of them.
>
> Or we could release RC1 after both events, but that starts to be early
> October, and that seems like a long delay, and I for one will be pretty
> exhausted after jet-lag and 2 weeks of travel, putting any RC1 into mid
> October at the earliest.  That in turn makes it harder to get a release
> actually made in 2012.
>
> The other disadvantage is that while conferences are a great goal to aim
> at for releases, the quick-and-dirty development style (needed to
> isolate issues quickly) may simply mean we either have patches in the
> tree that are not totally ready (simply because they were prepared under
> pressure) or we have a long delay as we wait for folks to work though
> their backlog.
>
> This timing also affects our downstream distributions, so I would
> appreciate any views from that direction as well.
>
I think we should really start to tackle all our blocking bugs for 4.0 
before the RC, we can recheck the list also we discussed about a white 
paper for users about 4.0 in terms of understanding what is this 4.0 
release (ie. stability of the file server between version 3.6.x and 
4.0.x, ...) I think if we decide not to have read ACLs activated it's 
*really* important to state it in this kind of paper so that admin 
picking this are aware of it.
A release a bit before SDC didn't sounds to bad if we starts to tackle 
the two points mentioned before.

I'm sorry for being quite offline, I'm quite busy at work with new 
projects that are leaving me a bit lazy in the evening. I'm hoping to 
get back in the track pretty soon though.


-- 
Matthieu Patou
Samba Team
http://samba.org