Comment 36 for bug 32067

Short-term solution for Gutsy:

1) samba is not installed by default, people explictely require this package to be installed. They want to share files. It should share files immideately after installing without requiring futher user interaction!

2) pam-backend keeps it secure, without forcing the user the use different passwords, or anything. We already have a user-management system, we don't need another one for each separate application.

3) printers should be shared without requiring a password! Windows doesn't seem to support connecting to samba-printers which have passwords. When you select 'share with everybody' in system-config-printer interface this should extent to everybody on samba.

(Future) tweaks of the pam-backend:
  - have a samba-users group
  - newly created users are automatically part of this specific group

The underlying problem is an architectual problem which scope is much bigger than just SAMBA.
- All user, group and permission management should be centralized and managed within one interface (PAM).
- Packages should not implement their own ad-hoc user-management ( i vote to just strip all that crap )
- This does not just concern samba, there are more packages that think they are special enough to need their own user-management. Like MySql server for example.

We need to get rid of this, because:
 - they are all incompatible
 - they are inconsistent with each other
 - they are too complex for average desktop users (requires too many configuration interface, half of which don't exist yet)
 - they are too much hassle for system administrators

I think somebody official should set out an official policy on to deal with this widespread growth of custom user-managent stuff. If PAM does not suffice for specific packages, they or we need to file bugs about PAM, rather than go with some custom user-management different for each application and service.

But that's just my two cents. Perhaps i'm missing somehting very obvious here...