[Pkg-samba-maint] samba 3 and 4 in parallel in unstable?

[Steve Langasek]

On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 08:50:23AM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > > samba 4 fails to install. Note that this is an upgrade from samba 3.

> > Thanks for reporting this.  The issue is quite simple:  because the
> > samba3 upgrade isn't part of the testsuite, I overlooked the changes I
> > made to other js routines, and broke it.

> > I don't see any reason why we can't ship with some test data, and put
> > this into 'make test', and I'll also fix the scripts.

> > Thanks for the report!

> This brings me a suggestion, at least to be discussed.

> Steinar and Jeroen have currently built experimental samba4 packages
> as "samba" packages and thus can only upload them in experimental.

> This gives a quite low exposure to these packages as recent Debian
> history has shown (there has been some discussion about the number of
> people using experimental which has proven to be low quite often).

> Why not create samba4* packages and then upload them in unstable in
> parallel with samba* packages?

Because these packages are nowhere near being ready to be release candidates
for etch; and also because I don't believe we want to maintain samba3 and
samba4 in parallel in a stable Debian release.  If we're not aiming to put
it into stable, it doesn't (yet) belong in unstable.

> I'm pretty sure this would give more exposure to samba4 and thus
> improve the input for the Samba Team in the preparation of the Samba4
> release.

And concomitantly, it would also complicate our work as maintainers to
straighten out the upgrade path from samba3 to samba4 when the time came...

The original packages that Jeroen had prepared upstream *did* use a "4"
suffix; this was changed at my insistence because I believe that maintaining
parallel packages of new major versions is a bad long-term strategy, and
almost always implies abdication of the maintainer's responsibility to
provide a smooth upgrade path.  (There are some cases when it makes sense to
do this for end-user apps; for instance, a window manager whose config file
format changes, requiring users to re-create their configs by hand.  But
samba has no such issue, since there's no per-user migration involved...)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/
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