MIT and Heimdal development patterns

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Wed, 2024-02-14 at 20:19 +0000, Rowland Penny via samba-technical
wrote:
> As far as I understand it, the whole idea behind running Samba as an
> AD
> DC is to be Microsoft AD compatible, so having the extra MIT
> capabilities might be nice, but are not really necessary if AD cannot
> use them. Can I also point out that Samba 4 was released 11 years ago
> and, in all that time, MIT has been the coming thing, it still hasn't
> arrived, there has to be a reason for this, could it be that people
> are
> happy enough with Heimdal ?

The pattern has been for, with one or two smaller exceptions, for new
features to be developed against Heimdal and then work is done to make
the MIT KDC able to support those features.

The size of the gap depends a lot on how much you care about matching
error codes exactly, but in terms of developing new features, this is
possible (with a sad side-effect of a diverging feature branch due to
an poorly-resourced and disinterested upstream) with Heimdal, and not
commercially feasible with the expected development pattern for MIT.

That is why there hasn't been a great swap over to just supporting one,
which would overall be much less effort for the project.
The bargain at this point is that tests are written in implementation
independent Python, and that folks who care about the MIT KDC are most
welcome and encouraged to make them pass as their resources permit.  
If that knownfail file ever gets close to empty, we can perhaps have a
discussion about development going forward being against a Samba
vendored 'lorikeet MIT' (replacing lorikeet-Heimdal) and 'upstream
MIT', rather than the current two-implementation situation. 

Andrew Bartlett


-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
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