[Pkg-samba-maint] Mini samba Debian package maintenance meeting at SambaXP 2006?

[Christian Perrier]

Fellow Debian maintainers of samba...and Samba Team members,

An idea popped up in my (crazy) mind.

As usual, next year, from Apr. 24th to Apr. 26th, the Samba XP
conference will be held in Göttingen, Germany.

As usual I will attend it and as usual so will Noèl Köthe. From what I
remember, Peter Eisentraut also mentioned he can maybe attend (see the
background at the end of this mail for a kind of who's who).

Andrew Bartlett, who is quite active following the Debian BTS, will
also probably attend it, just like last years and just like most of
the Samba Team members.

For instance, IIRC, Simo Sorce usually attends the conference and,
from what I remember, he's involved in the Debian packages
maintenance, for packages maintained by the Samba team itself (please
correct me if I'm wrong).

Similarly, last year, I briefly discussed with Jelmer Vernooij about
Samba in Debian.

(people, please forgive me if I'm ignorant of your current activities
in the Samba Team...I know I should try to be more in touch)

In short, we might have enough people around to set up a micro-meeting
of people who are interested in the maintenance of official and
non-official packages for the Debian distribution (and Debian
derivatives such as Ubuntu...sorry, the name of the Ubuntu maintainer
went out of my old brain).

So, would any of you be interested in a more or less formal meeting
and/or work session on Debian packages before, during or after the
conference. Maybe the time of the conference tutorial on Apr. 24th
afternoon and Apr 25th morning would be appropriate.

The goal could be a closer examination of the many remaining bugs,
with the help of eyes deeply involved in the technical issues of Samba.

I added Jeremy Allison and Gerald Carter to the CC list, for
information, and also because we had interesting discussions last year
about the issues of maintaining Samba in Debian and derivatives (yes,
Jeremy, at the Irish bar...)....

Some background:

The maintenance of Samba packages in Debian had been during a long
time in the hands of Eloy Paris, with the added help of Steve
Langasek. 

Last months (nearly last year), Eloy couldn't be present
enough and Steve mostly maintained the package alone. Steve being in
charge of the Release Management in Debian obviously needed help and,
recently, a small team emerged with the additionnal help of Noèl
Köthe, Peter Eisentraut and partly myself. 

We're currently doing our best to empty the big sink of the Debian BTS
and sort out pending stuff such as proposed patches and
Debian-specific patches. One of the goals is working as close as
possible with upstream and of course keep Samba in Debian in a good
shape.

Hoping this mail will raise some interest among some of you, please
receive my greetings..... ;-)



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