[Pkg-samba-maint] building other libraries from the samba source

[Michael Tokarev]

25.04.2022 11:00, Mathieu Parent wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 7:21 PM Michael Tokarev <mjt at tls.msk.ru> wrote:
..
> I would recommend keeping things as they are. While samba is tightly
> linked with ldb (thru private ABIs), talloc, tevent and tdb have a
> clear public API that is consumed by samba. Also they have fewer
> releases and are rarely affected by security updates (I checked this,
> and there are NO CVE for those 3 packages).

The fact that other libraries have their own stable API changes
nothing really, - they will continue to have exacty the same clear
public API no matter if we build them from samba source or from
their own separate source.

But having security releases of samba making also new releases of
these libraries might be a valid concern indeed. There's no need
to update the libraries in case there's a samba security fix out,
and samba usually has a LOT of security fixes.

The thing is that once done, such a swallowing makes maintenance
of talloc & tevent & tdb completely unnecessary, we only have to
update just one package instead of 4 (or 5 when ldb was built
from its own source).  That is something which sounds good to
my lazy nature ;))  But yes, you're obviously right.

> (this is just a recommendation, it's up to you).
> 
>> The only real thing which bothers me is the lack of tests.
>> We don't run samba testsuite (already discussed).  But we can run at least the
>> common libraries testsuite. For one, we can run ldb testsuite.
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> I wonder if it is possible to do when ldb is built as part of samba build...
> 
> No idea.

It turned out this is something which does not work at all.

Actually, the testing is really lacking in upstream samba
build system. It just doesn't work. Despite the excellent
testsuite coverage. For one, I haven't even found a way
to make it print list of available test (documented waf
--list argument), and I wasn't able to find out if there
are any ldb-related tests it will do when ldb is built
as part of samba build.

Waf is the definitely worst build system I faced so far,
with the good gap between it and the next-bad one.  And
its apparently buggy usage in samba makes it significantly
worse.

/mjt