[Pkg-samba-maint] samba.org .deb packages builds?

[Christian Perrier]

(CC'ed to the mailing list of Debian samba package maintainers. That
ML is semi-moderated: posts from @samba.org addresses are allowed
without moderation)

During SambaXP, some of you know I discussed the current status of
.deb packages here and there. That happened mostly with Karolin or
John Terpstra, but also with Michael Adam (at the very end of the
conference) as well as, last year, with Simo Sorce and Jerry Carter.

I think that most readers of this list know that I am part of the
(small) team who maintains the .deb packages in Debian itself (and,
indirectly, Ubuntu). That team consisting mostly of Steve Langasek, me
and Noèl Köthe as of today (a few other people participate from time
to time, but they're much less active...hope you guys won't be
offended if you read that).

The situation is pretty unclear to me about who's (in the Samba Team)
in charge of building and providing binary .deb packages on
ftp.samba.org when releases are out. It apparently seems to be pretty
unclear to Karolin as well..:-)...Simo was doing that in the past, but
my understanding was that some switch had to happen with Jerry.

I think that, in order to avoid work duplication, samba.org packages
should be as close as possible to Debian/Ubuntu packages (and
vice--versa)...but probably still keeping some differences (the most
important being the files location stuff, which is our "famous" FHS
patches).

Still....apart from that, I suspect that it might be easy to derive
the samba.org packages from the Debian ones. Similarly, packages
provided by third parties (namely SerNet on their servers) could
converge as well.

As a demo of this, I worked during the conference to bring the Sernet
packages (ftp://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/recent/src/debian) much much
closer to Debian ones, still respecting what makes them different
(different naming scheme, splitted "cifs" package, no FHS patches, a
few specific patches). That worked fairly well and I sent the result
to Karolin for discussion.

To continue on this, I hereby offer to work on samba.org .deb packages
and discuss with whoever is in charge of them to see what we could
do. I'm even OK to have some work done by myself at first, for this.
The final goal would be to establish a kind of workflow where
improvements made to Debian packages can go to samba.org ones while
*still* respecting what makes both different if that's relevant (FHS,
FHS!).

May anyone interested in that topic comment on this?