While a few of us have been working very hard on Samba 4 to allow it to rock your socks off as an Active Directory Domain Controller, some of the other Samba developers have been working just as hard on improving the existing Samba 3 codebase and adding features to that. This situation has caused tension between developers as well as technical problems in the past - code with the same purpose is being developed in parallel, libraries diverge because features are only added in one branch and not in the other, one codebase is considered “obsolete” by some and the other is considered only a playground for experimental features by others.
As of yesterday, we now have the two codebases living in one and the same git branch. This should make it a lot easier for the two to use the same libraries. Better yet, it should allow us to reconcile the copies of various libraries that exist in both codebases, all of which have diverged to some degree in the last few years.
After a few problems came up merging the two branches the easy way (they both have a directory called “source” and git doesn’t deal well with renaming them to “source3” and “source4” respectively), we decided to replay the history of both branches . This has the disadvantage that all existing branches that are based on the Samba 3 and Samba 4 branches will have to be rebased against the new master branch, but it also means we keep the ability to run “git log” inside of our source directories and having it work right.
Other than the fact that this makes it possible to share more code between the two codebases, one of the ideas we have is also to see if it is possible to provide an Active Directory DC by glueing the best bits of Samba 3 and Samba 4 together (aka “Franky“) before they are eventually merged completely.
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