On the way to Samba 4: Part 1

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After Samba XP 2008 Andrew and I started keeping a wiki page with our bi-weekly goals and achievements for Samba 4. Because planning in a Free Software project is hard (time availability and priorities change over time, and other volunteers are equally unpredictable) we called this our “Fantasy Page”; it listed things we wanted to work on next (“fantasies”), but reality being what it is we would usually actually end up working on something entirely different. We discussed our progress and new plans in - what I would now call - a bi-weekly standup call.

There were several reasons for doing this. It gave us some sense of direction as well as a sense of accomplishment; a way to look back at the end of the year and realize how much we had actually achieved. Because Samba 4 is such a long term project (it is 7 years old at this point) it is easy to become disillusioned, to look back at a year of commits and to not see the gradual improvement, just the fact that there is no release yet.

We managed to keep this up for two years, much longer than I had anticipated, and eventually started to slip last year.

More recently Kai and Tridge have started to blog weekly about their efforts to make Samba 4.0 a reality and I’m going to join them by trying to blog regularly - every two weeks - about my contributions, even if there were none.

In the next two weeks I plan to work on finally getting alpha 14 of Samba 4 out and on fixing the daily builds of Samba 4 and OpenChange for Ubuntu on Launchpad after we did a massive reorganization of the private libraries in Samba 4.

Current Playing: Zero 7 - Somersault

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