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Tridgell Taking Samba Beyond POSIX
dW writes "The Australian hacker has been working on pushing Samba beyond the POSIX world and figuring out what work needs to be done to get Samba to support new filesystems such as XFS, ext3, and Storage Tank. The answer is nothing less than a complete rewrite of Samba's smbd code, which has become his latest pet project. Here's an interview with Andrew Tridgell on his latest Samba rewrite."
A complete rewrite? WTF? I thought smart developers learned a long time ago that rewrites are almost always a waste of time.
There are many issues to be overcome when doing a complete rewrite. As a developer, I understand the desire to rewrite something from scratch to make it feel better. You feel like you are doing something to improve the system. However, this hardly ever happens. Most developers face serious burn-out issues when they rewrite something. It's fun at first but as you realize the magnitude of what you're trying to do, you quickly start to burn out before you are even close to finishing.
The thing is, even if you do manage to rewrite everything, there will STILL be issues. Hacks, special conditions, etc. All the same types of issues that made you feel bad about the original version will be present in the new version. They may take a different form, but they will still be there.
Successful systems tend to just continue off the old code. Rewrite the problem areas, add things that are needed, etc. That's how you make forward progress. In the end, the only thing that matters is that it works. It doesn't matter how crappy you feel about the code, if it works then people can and will use it.
It's not an impossible task, I just think it's not the smartest thing to do.
The ratio of people to cake is too big