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Samba Code Fork Announced
Andrew Klaassen writes: "No, it's not just another Samba code branch. It's a much more serious code fork, led by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton and some of the coders who brought PDC functionality to Samba. The announcement was very circumspect about the developer differences which led up to the fork, as is the new project's (currently rather threadbare) Web site."
It's true that there are many different patches around, and custom kernels with major distributions.
But what hasn't developed is a derivitive "Stanix" or "Davix" "Tomix", where someone else is in charge of the entire source tree.
When a fork happens, someone new assumes responsibility for the entire tree. They don't pay very much attention to the other branch.
But patches are just improvements is specific areas. They acknowledge the main branch as essentially good, but lacking in one respect or another, and fix just that aspect. Most of the good patches will join the main branch at some point.
So yeah, there's a lot of variation out there. But it's not quite forking.
Samba works fine with W2k, I use it every day. Lots of users, lots of drive maps. You can have account mappings and shared directories and everything you may like.
The thing they want to get sorted is that we still need a W2K Domain Controller. Samba can't do the job so you can't have an all Linux network server and appear to be beating MS's drum in terms of network structure. I least thats they way I read it last time I checked the FAQs, but I'm no SMB pro.
I've got a P166 to do ALL the file serving and a P333 just to control the domain. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
Hey I wrote a program, and I got so many requests by others for this and that to be added in and I added osme of the features in like reading data from a pipe into the editor. Some submitted a patch some did not. In the end some people asked me permision to start there own projects using my code to add this or that functionality and I said that it was fine. As long as there are no hard feelings between the two groups of the samba projectS.
Hey if you look at the Linux kernel there are already so many forks in it. Redhat and SuSe send out there own version of the kernel with there own special patches already applied to them. There are patches all over the place that allow you to customize the kernel and add features that are not part of the main distribution. Has that hurt Linux? NO it has actually helped as now the code gets tested more. It is a good thing. Althought there is not an announced fork in the Linux kernel they exists. Hey not to long ago there was an article about some compnay who was offering a patch that made Linux perform better for RT video and gaming.
Hey forks happen!
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
I am not involved in the samba/tng projects in any way, except as a user, but I've been following the project sort-of closely for a good while, and here's how things about this fork look like.
First, TNG was *not* the devel branch of samba, it was a parallel branch to the HEAD (aka main) branch of samba. TNG's objective has always been to create a Primary Domain Controller with full WindowsNT4.0 functionality. HEAD's objective has never been stated as to haveing a PDC...it's for a file/print share server, nothing else.
Samba has been able to authenticate win9x clients for a while, but if you have an NT worktsation, you need to have an NT server to authenticate your domain, because samba won't listen to it.
Luke and other samba developers have been working on TNG for a good while (as long as I have been following samba) with the goal of creating a Samba PDC that you can't distinguish from an NT4.0 PDC.
There has always been some tension between Luke/the TNG team and the main Samba team, because of technical and phylosophical matters, that came to a conclussion about a month ago, when Luke decided to drop out of the Samba team and, aparently, drop TNG.
Now, Luke and the other TNG people have decided not to drop TNG, but fork it off samba.
As a user/administrator of samba boxes, I believe this is one of those forks that will end up in the Good Thing list....why?
Samba is a great file/print shareing server, fast and reliable (as fast and reliable as the very broken and ugly SMB protocol can be), and the samba team focuses on that, and they do it well.
TNG's objective is, for all purposes, different and broader...they want to create a Primary Domain Controller That Doesn't Suck, that is...a *nix based PDC, and that, in my view, is a Good Thing.
They travell the same paths, because file/print shareing and PDCs use the SMB protocol to accomplish their job in a mixed enviroment...but they have never really been the same thing...and I see this fork as a Good Thing.
If you really want all the info on this, read up on the archives for the samba mailing lists, or the Kernel Cousin - Samba archives that Linuxcare puts out every week, you'll be able to understand what's going on better.
Vox, who knows good things will come out from Samba and TNG.
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
I think anyone who has followed the development of the samba project over the past few years, even at a distance, can understand this fork. samba, as a project, is necessarily somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, the primary reason is to "emulate" file and print services provided by the microsoft platform. On the other hand, i think that the developers would like to provide an independently valuable server platform.
But samba, as a project, has not quickly been able to adapt new funcitonality provided by microsoft. encrypted passwords and PDC functionality are good example.
People in the open-source community are rightfully jittery about forks, but I think that this one could make sense. On the one hand, we get the main samba project persuing the goal of just having a great file sharing server platform. On the other hand, we have a lighter-weight project with the specific goal of just acheiving W2K full interoperability. I think this could be cool.
When a source code tree forks, there can very easily be misunderstanding and speculations about why the fork occurred and what will happen next.
:)
:) )
Luke leighton is a very good friend of mine. He was the Samba team member who helped get me involved with Samba. He still is a very good friend of course.
I have talked about this with Sander Striker and some of the others as well. It is important that the goal of the Samba TNG (as stated in the source code fork announcement) is to use the existing TNG code base for a portable dce/rpc library as well as other RPC implementations / research.
So this begs the question, what will happen now?
We all hope to be able to learn from and share ideas/code/jokes with each other. Hopes are that this will free up Luke and others to focus solely of the MS RPC implementation in Windows NT/2000. Samba itself will greatly benefit by being able to take advantage of the effort exerted by the TNG developers. In return, the TNG project will hopefully benefit just as much from the code review process of implementing these same RPCs in Samba. (developers often say it takes 3 - 4 four implementations to get something right
IMO (although I hate code forks as much as anyone), this was a good move for both Samba and the TNG project. I will not be surprised to development of both projects accelerate. Of course, this is only speculation, but I base it on the fact that we all can pursue each projects goals without being held back by trying to be portable to both code trees. This became alomost impossible even before TNG became a separate GPL'd project.
If you are interested in finding out more, I encourage you to view Samba's development roadmap at http://www.samba.org/samba/development.html (choose your local morror site please) and the Samba TNG pages at http://www.samba-tng.org/
Cheers, jerry
SAMBA Team