Samba development is progressing at an extremely hectic pace. There are currently four trees under active development (For those new to the open source style of development, a "tree" consists of all the latest source code of the software, to which developers have access. Developers "check in" portions of code they are working on, and then "check out" the new code for others to test and debug when they have finished).

There is the SAMBA_STABLE branch, which has the regularly released "stable code", for you and me to use. New features are not introduced into this tree until they’ve been thoroughly tested in unstable versions. The stable Samba tree at this time doesn’t have the ability to be a domain controller for Win NT machines.

The second branch is the SAMBA_TNG branch, which is where the main thrust of development is going on at the moment. TNG stands for "The Next Generation", and includes all the "cool code", such as domain controller for NT and Win 2000 machines, support for NT- specific administrative tools such as "User Manager for Domains", and trust relationships, etc.

The Third branch is the SAMBA_HEAD branch, which is the successor to the current 2.0.x series. It contains improved file and print sharing services and NT file permissions support. However, it contains no NT PDC support.

The last and final branch is the HEAD_WITH_TNG branch, which is exactly what you might imagine from its name.

The most interesting of these branches is the SAMBA_TNG branch, which focuses on Win NT PDC controller code. It currently suffers from poor file serving ability, but code mergers with the SAMBA_HEAD branch will take care of this problem in the near future.

So if you’re a hacker, or kid with a network and time to spare, download the TNG or HEAD branch and play with the code. Finding bugs or contributing documentation is the easiest way to help the development effort, if you’re not a developer yourself.

Babu Kalakrishnan, a Director at Sankya System & Objects, Bangalore www://www.sankya.com