On pe, 15 huhti 2022, Peter Boy wrote:
Perhaps we can try to have the discussion of further development from
a
different perspective? Namely, what do we want to achieve and what
means can we use? (Instead of what is not possible)
Originally, we wanted to make it easier for the Sysadmin to manage
Samba shares, that is create, delete, modify shares, and add, remove,
modify permissions of users. And we want to do it on servers, not any
server, but =Fedora Server Edition=. nothing else. It was inspired by
specific user questions, if I remember correctly.
And we want to use Fedora packages, which have a broader perspective,
of course. So we may add a "Fedora Server Samba config package“ which
tailors the broader perspective to Fedora Server Edition? Maybe not a
rpm, but set of stop-by-step doc, Ansible playbook, or a shell script.
As Server Edition we have an idea, how to use and manage various
services and how a service fits best into Fedora Server Edition
infrastructure (e.g. we write about how to add virtualization and use
postgres database, both much simpler as Samba, just an example of the
idea).
So we can add docs "Installing and Configuring Samba on Fedora Server
Edition“ and create a configuration template that works and that does
not cause a lot of questions or bug reports. And fit file sharing
module into it. (I wrote once such a guide decades ago at the time of
Fedora Core something. A lot has changed, but in principle this should
be possible today as well). At the end we may have an Ansible script
that does the work.
Not very specific so far, but maybe we should start with a use case?
To me Fedora Server Edition does not exist independently of the Fedora
itself. A part of the work to improve server user experience in Fedora,
I consider collaboration with upstream projects that we package and
represent in Fedora. If there is no collaboration, it is hard to
influence changes that are required to achieve better user experience or
move forward to implement specific features needed for the distribution.
It is what makes Fedora a best distribution to run FreeIPA, for example,
as we continuously reassess both Fedora and RHEL needs, reflect them in
requirements towards upstream projects (not just FreeIPA, there are
about dozen projects we have to actively work with to make it all
happen), come to upstream with proposals and implementations of those
proposals and so on.
I do not think claiming that a particular package is only supported
within Fedora Server Edition is a sound approach. Sure, you can do that,
and I would probably be the last one who would stop you from that. I am
more concerned with the resulting drain of my time as an official
package maintainer (for samba, freeipa, sssd, krb5, etc.) when dealing
with bugs I cannot solve for the users who reported them. I feel sorry
for those users for not being able to help them.
For Samba and file systems we already have comprehensive materials in
RHEL documentation. They were developed together with RHEL engineers and
upstream contributors. Samba documents, for example, were written by
Marc Muehlfeld who is documentation writer at Red Hat but also a Samba
Team member and wrote a lot of documentation on
wiki.samba.org.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/...
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9-...
I am not sure how these can be pulled into Fedora documentation, though.
--
/ Alexander Bokovoy