[Pkg-samba-maint] Target for squeeze: 3.4 or 3.5?

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Steve Langasek (vorlon at debian.org):

thanks for explaining your position, Steve...

> I haven't seen an upstream statement regarding the intended EOL of 3.4, but
> extrapolating from past behavior - such as a security release for Samba 3.0
> in October 2009, over 6 years after 3.0 was first released and a year and a
> half after Samba 3.2 was released - I don't think there's much risk of the
> squeeze release cycle (now + 3? 4? years) being affected by an upstream EOL
> of 3.4 support.  Even if this were the case, all would not be lost for
> security support for 3.4, since at least one other distribution - Ubuntu -
> will definitely be shipping 3.4 in their upcoming release, so 3.4 will be
> covered by downstream security support for 5 years.

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba3_Release_Planning

The main point are:

- two major releases a year
- when release N+1 is prepared, release N is current, release N-1 is 
  in maintenance mode, release N-2 only gets security fixes and
  release N-3 is discontinued

Samba 3.5.0 has been out by March 1st 2010, which leads to assume that
3.6 could be out either in July (original release planning), or
September....or even later.

So, 3.4 would turn into security only mode as of September, which is,
imho, the realistic date for squeeze release (if the freeze happens in
May-June).

And, starting on Spring 2011, we would be on our own for security updates.

So, by the time squeeze is frozen (latest news are late May or June),
we will have at least a few 3.5 releases, which gives a realistic view
that 3.5 will be even more stabilizing during the time we're preparing
the freeze and, later on, during the freeze.

> Quite apart from that, I disagree with uploading upstream versions to
> unstable that we don't believe are currently stable enough for release on
> the *expectation* that the release team will miss their freeze goal by 4

Which is why I waited until now to push again for 3.5 in unstable. The
release team published what they think is a realistic freeze
schedule. And I even think this is optimistic!

> months and leave us time for the upstream branch to stabilize.  That's a
> self-fulfilling prophecy - of course if everyone maintains their packages in
> the belief that Debian isn't freezing any time soon, it ensures that Debian
> won't be ready to freeze any time soon.  If 3.5 has some time to mature and
> the Debian freeze continues to lag, then we could still switch to 3.5 for
> squeeze later without painting ourselves into a corner now.

We have about one month to avoid painting ourselves in a corner....but
delaying 3.5 in unstable is just giving less chances to our users to
spot annoying bugs (as you probably noticed more users are now using
our backports even on production servers....which gives more "real
life" exposure to these packages).

> 
> BTW, not too long ago you responded on one of the upstream mailing lists to
> a poster who complained that the Debian Samba packages never worked for him
> while the Ubuntu ones did.  While it's true that the packaging is the same
> between Debian and Ubuntu for Samba, we've actually never had an Ubuntu and
> Debian release shipping the same upstream version of Samba.  So while I
> think it's just bad luck that the one particular user hit a bug in the
> Debian Samba package that was fixed in the version Ubuntu shipped, and that
> there are surely users for whom the reverse is true, I think it's worth
> considering whether there are other fringe benefits to sticking with the
> same Samba branch as Ubuntu for release.

I agree it would be good the have a parallel with an Ubuntu LTS
release. This is indeed the last argument that has currently enough
weight for me.

My proposal becomes the following: we give ourselves a target date of
May 25th to decide about our final choice for squeeze. It allows us to
discuss with upstream at SambaXP as well as discuss together about
this too..:-).

So, as a consequence, we go for 3.4.8 in unstable before this (it is
planned for May 11th), let it age enough to enter testing. We release
3.5.2 in the meantime to experimental.

Would that be OK with you (ie "wait a little bit before uploading 3.5
in unstable)?

As a end user, I have two reasons for pushing for 3.5 over 3.4:

- better support for 64bit printing. This is definitely a killer
  feature in these days where organisations are switching their
  Windows systems to 64bit (mine is, the switch happening during 2010)

- noticeably better ctdb support. Mathieu pointed this out and we
  can expect ctdb-based setups to be come much more common.




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