[Pkg-samba-maint] samba4 packages

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2013-02-16 at 13:24 +0000, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-02-16 at 11:23 +0100, Christian PERRIER wrote:
> > Quoting Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer at debian.org):
> > 
> > > Now that samba 4.0 has been released, we should get rid of the samba4
> > > source package for jessie and just have all of its binary packages be
> > > built from the samba source package. We discussed ways of doing this
> > > before, but I don't think there is a clear plan yet?
> > 
> > The plan is mostly "wait until wheezy is released but also plan to
> > work on this at SambaXP in May".
> I think Andrew is keen on working on it before then. :) I'm happy to
> wait for wheezy to be released before moving onto this.

Yes, I'm hoping to work on this much sooner than that.  

As an upstream developer, it remains a source of considerable
frustration that I have to tell our users that there is no, not even
experimental or PPA, package of Samba 4.0 as released, for any major
distribution.  Instead, we have a situation where on Red Hat based
systems the DC is deliberately removed, and on Debian based systems the
smbd file server is deliberately removed.  (Corrections on this point
welcome).

I know there are very good reasons, but I'm still not very happy about
that, because building a complete product only to have major components
removed by our distributors only causes major frustration all around. 

Furthermore, others build on top of Samba, often also in Debian
packages, such as OpenChange and SoGo, so our users are particularly
frustrated when I tell them they must build from source, because then
their other packages won't cleanly install.

Additionally, I work on NETGEAR's ReadyNAS, and it's no secret that this
is a Debian box inside.  While it is quite practical to maintain private
packages (and this is done), much of the advantage of being based on
Debian comes from the integration of many packages.  That means being as
close to upstream as possible is worth spending time on.  For NETGEAR
that means ensuring a good Samba 4.0 package is eventually available in
upstream Debian, for the file server at least.

Adding in my desire to have the AD DC correctly and fully packaged, this
means I've decided to try and work on a combined package.  My hope is
that experimental can then be a suitable home for that package.  

Now that the 4.0.3 package is out, I'll get back to my combined
packaging work I started a few months back and see what I can manage in
terms of a total package.  My hope is that then our users who want to
run the AD DC can then run this package, and get the whole of Samba, as
released by the Samba Team.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org