[Pkg-samba-maint] News about backports

[Christian Perrier]

You probably noticed some activity these days, in the SVN
repository..:-) (including errors, changes of minnd, etc.)

Most of them are related to the preparation and "publication" of
backported packages.

The point of this mail is to give news about these backports and my
intents....of course opening the discussion to suggestions and
possible enhancements.

"Official" backports
--------------------

Those are backports meant to be uploaded to backports.org (bpo). The policy
there is that packages uploaded in bpo must be in testing.

As of now, the only archive there is etch-backports.

So, I rencetly uploaded the 3.2.5-4 version to bpo, with
2:3.2.5-4~bpo41+1 as version number. You'll noticed the small mistake
I made ("bpo41" should have been "bpo40") which escpaed my attention
and the bpo ftpmaster's attention. Sad, but we'll have to live with
it....

The only actions needed to backport our current stable packages are:
- drop libtalloc-dev from the build dependencies
- add "--without-libtalloc" in debian/rules

Julien Cristau pointed me to the "libcups2-dev | libcupsys2-dev" build
dependency that should be changed to "libcupsys2-dev" for Etch, as
causing problems for some arches. I haven't thought deeper to
this..:-)

These bpo packages material is kept in
branches/samba/backports.org/etch in SVN with upstream versions kept
in branches/samba/upstream.

"Unofficial" backports
----------------------

I felt it would be good to also offer our users more "bleeding edge"
versions of samba. Particularly, when one sees the changes in 3.2.6 and
3.2.8, it might be quite useful for them to use these packages
preferrably over the official packages in either Etch of Lenny, or
even the official backported packages from bpo.

This is meant to be hosted at
http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages

As of now, I created packages for lenny and etch, for samba 3.2.8, and
only for i386.

The version numbers are 2:3.2.8-1~unoff{40|50}+1. Even thouogh there
is no 2:3.2.8-1 version anywhere, I felt it would be good to have
something similar to bpo versioning scheme.

These bpo packages material is kept in
branches/samba/backports-unofficial/{etch|lenny} in SVN with upstream
versions kept in branches/samba/upstream-3.2.

The future?
-----------

As soon as lenny is released, the plan for official packages is to
upload 3.3.0 in unstable.

When that one reaches testing, we should then create packages for bpo
with 3.3.0 (or 3.3.1 at that time, which release is planned soon by
Karolin) and upload them to etch-backprots and lenny-backports (which
hopefully will be opened at that moment).

Similarly, such packages for etch and lenny could replace 3.2.8 in our
unofficial repository.

However, we have two choices here:

- replace unoff packages by 3.3.* packages and forget about 3.2 ones
- create a new unoff branch (unoff33?) for 3.3 packages and continue
maintaining 3.2 packages in unoff, at least as long as upstream
officially supports 3.2

Other good things to do would be:
- have packages for non i386 arches in unoff*
- automate the archive creation in our unofficial archive (including
  an uplaod area). I do this currently manually with weird use of
  dpkg-scanpackages and dpkg-scansources. This is certainly naive
  and should be more automated.
- better advertize our backports (as of now, I did so only in my blog)


As one sees, there is still more room for improvement...:-)




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