[Pkg-samba-maint] Plans for samba packages

[Christian Perrier]

Folks, 

After a discussion with Steve on IRC, please find below a project for
a mail to -release, announcing our plans for the samba packages in
lenny.



Dear release team,

Please find here a short summary of the plans of the samba packages
maintenance team.

Samba in lenny is currently 3.0.30-3

3.0.30-4 is in unstable, with a fix for a regression that was
introduced by the last security fix. That fix comes from the 3.0.31
release which was released by upstream yesterday.

Also very recently, upstream finally released the 3.2.0 version of
Samba. That version was uploaded to experimental, which is what we did
for all pre-release versions of Samba 3.2.

Samba 3.2 brings in many enhancements that are considered important
enough by the community of Samba users (integration in Windows 2003 AD
cross-forests and domain trusts, interdomain relationship with Windows
2008, new ldb backend, encryoted SMB transport...). It is licensed
under GPL v3. We sorted out licensing issues for libsmbclient.


On the other hand, the 3.0.* branch of Samba has now be declared deeply frozen
by upstream. To quote them: "With the release of Samba 3.2.0 on July
1, the clock has been started to End-Of-Life the Samba 3.0 series on
July 1, 2009.  Moving forward, any 3.0.x releases will be on a as
needed basis for critical bug fixes or security issues only."

It means that releasing lenny with Samba 3.0.* would lead us into
problems supporting it in about one year. And lenny would definitely
shipped with a Samba that's considered outdated by users and upstream.

For that reason, the Samba maintainers think it would be wiser to
release lenny with 3.2, which we are preparing for about 6 months now.

Our plans are currently to wait for 3.0.30-4 to enter testing as a
"safe" option. Then, upload 3.2.0 to unstable and maybe block it for testing
transition in case the freeze is not announced in the meantime (that
would allow deeper testing than the usual 10 days).

We will announce this in Samba lists and try to get as much testing as
possible (which is tricky: most production Samba servers are running
*stable* and those are the ones we don't want to break).

We understand this comes very close to the freeze date. This was
unfortunately needed by delays in upstream release process (Debian is
not the only project that releases "when it's ready").

The Samba packaging team:
Steve Langasek, Christian Perrier, Noèl Köthe, Jelmer Vernooij, Eloy
A. Paris, Adam Conrad and other contributors (Jerry Carter, Ubuntu
server team, etc.)

PS: there are packages for Samba 4 (samba4), that are currently in
experimental. They'll be uploaded to unstable at some moment (probably
soon) but we will block them for testign transition. We *do not*
target these for lenny.

-- 



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