How to move storage OEMs to Samba 4.0 ?

[Ira Cooper]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 06:52:17PM +0200, Kai Blin wrote:
>> On 2012-06-06 18:02, Jeremy Allison wrote:
>>
>> > Actually, we've been good and getting better. OEMs have come to
>> > really trust our stability within a release stream. It's moving
>> > to a new release stream they *really* don't like.
>>
>> So aren't we risking that exact trust by putting a lot of new features
>> into the stable release stream?
>
> Define "a lot" :-). I'm not proposing a lot, just the ones
> we have already running at OEMs anyway. They're already
> in production, we should give these things a home.

To debunk some things in this thread:

1. Not all bug fixes are safe.  Sometimes your "bug fix" will blow up
someone else.

2. Not all features are unsafe.  If you never enable them.  They might
as well not exist, in many cases, especially VFS changes.

So this is not an absolute issue.  Not even close.

I'm going to propose an in-between answer.  We allow back-porting of
new functionality into 3.6.  But it should be under stricter review,
to help with the QA issues.

I'd prefer 3 sets of eyes in addition to the original developer, from
2+ companies.  IE: Volker has a proposed change, he needs someone
outside SerNET to sign off, the other 2 can be from SerNET.

In addition to more review, clearly this raises the level of effort
needed to backport something.  Which should stop "frivolous"
backports, and will provide a long term incentive to move forward to
4.0 and higher.

Thanks,

-Ira