How to move storage OEMs to Samba 4.0 ?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Wed, 2012-06-06 at 14:43 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 11:33:17PM +0200, Björn JACKE wrote:
> > On 2012-06-06 at 12:36 -0700 Jeremy Allison sent off:
> > > On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 09:24:36PM +0200, Björn JACKE wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Changing the rules, that means introduce new features, which will means we will
> > > > also introduce new bugs - we will lose trust among our users - with good
> > > > cause. 
> > > 
> > > What do you propose to tell our OEMs ?
> > 
> > also OEMs are happy if we have stable branches. New features should go in a new
> > branch or different new branches if required. Making stable branches unstable
> > isn't any option.
> 
> No one is talking about making stable branches unstable. I'm talking about
> backports of QA'd code. This is what YOUR COMPANIES BUSINESS MODEL IS BASED
> ON !

And I think it should be left as exactly that - the supported business
modal of companies and OEMs.  They are best placed to make the changes,
asses the risk and benefits and provide the guarantee that if it all
goes to mush, that they have engineers to fix it back up again.

The problem with doing this as a community is that as Kai has said, we
are already stretched too far.  We have enough trouble making stable
releases with just bug fixes.  It might be a very different matter if we
were reliably sticking to our schedules. 

I think adding anything more than a VFS module risks blurring the line
that is already fuzzy do to the natural tendency for programmers
bias/optimism.  Even a VFS module is a bad example, as that is the
perfect case for being shipped externally (why else do we go to so much
trouble to make that possible)?

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org