[Pkg-samba-maint] 2nd Draft: Pre-approval request for uploading samba 3.5.4 in unstable, targeting squeeze

[Christian Perrier]

Second draft after Luk's comments:

Hello dear release team,

Since the beginning of 2010, the samba packaging team (and
particularly Steve Langasek and me) is pondering about the version of
samba to finally have in Squeeze.

Upstream release schedule was, until April 2010, to release a version
every 6 months, with 3 successive versions supported. Once a version
(say 3.5.0) has been released, it gets monthly point releases (3.5.1,
3.5.2, etc.)with bugfixes and no new features. The former release (3.4
in my example) is then in maintenance mode with fixes for severe bugs
as well as security fixes. The version before (3.3 in my example) just
gets the security fixes and all former versions have discontinued
support.

One can see this as a similar model to Debian (if we consider that we
maintain oldstable for some time).

Since April 2010, the Samba Team decided to use a 9-month release
schedule with the same policy. They did so after discussing with many
vendors and distro maintainers, including us.

Our original plan (back in late 2009, early 2010) was targeting the
3.4 releases of samba, as squeeze was planned for a release in the
first semester of 2010 or so. This would have had the advantage of
being in sync with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (that has 3.4.8, based on our
packages with very few differences).

This is why the current version in squeeze and unstable is 3.4.8

Meanwhile, our upstream released 3.5.0 as of March 1st, 2010 and we
uploaded it to experimental. Since then, they released point releases
of it and 3.5.4 is currently the last version. We also backported that
version to lenny and have good feedback from users (of course, the
"official" backport on bpo is what we currently have in squeeze,
namely 3.4.8). 

In end July, they released the first pre-release of 3.6

Back in April, we debated in our developement list about the version
to use and finally decided.....there was no hurry to inject 3.5 in
unstable as, usually, samba releases need to mature a bit and
regressions happened in the past (we only had 3.5.1 at that time).

With time flowing, the situation in July/August changed and we were
indeed converging to have 3.5.4 in unstable when....the freeze was
decided..:-)

I personnally think quite strongly that we should have 3.5 in squeeze,
for the following reasons:

- 3.6 should be out in the upcoming months, so 3.4 will soon be
supported only security-wise...and the support will stop 9 months
later. Then we'll be on our own to support samba security-wise for
over 2 years (the remaining of squeeze support cycle plus one year)

- 3.5 packages are used for quite a while now: those from experimental
but, more significantly, the backports we made for lenny

- 3.5 brings features that are missing in 3.4:
  - first implementation of SMB2 (that will not be the default,
    though) which is the default protocol in Windows Vista and
    later versions
  - net, smbclient and libsmbclient can use credentials cached by
    winbind. Brings a much easier connection to shares with Nautilus,
    for instance (users don't have to re-enter credentials for each
    share they connect)
  - support for point-n-print from 64-bit clients is finally reliable.
    With the increasing prevalence of Windows 7 (which should make
    many organizations to switch to 64-bit Windows environments),
    that feature is a key feature. In general, the printing code
    got a major rewrite in 3.5.* and is much more robust.
  - several problems with Windows 7 clients are fixed (particularly
    when accessing a large number of files)

Posting a diff between the current 3.4.8 and the planned 3.5.4 would
make no sense. So, we should rather suggest that we (Debian) rely on
the Samba team reliability and the visible lack of regressions in 3.5
since it was released. Moreover, the Samba Team has proven in the past
that important and RC bugs are easily fixed in their point releases,
which we indeed widely used during the maintenance of 3.2 that's used
in lenny.

Would you mind having us upload 3.5.4 packages in unstable, eventually
blocking it artificially for more than 10 days so that it is tested
enough by unstable users?

-- 





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Christian Perrier
Chef d'unité Informatique individuelle et départementale
Département Réseaux et Informatique Scientifique
Onera - http://www.onera.fr
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