[Pkg-samba-maint] Ship crappy export of upstream git in unstable instead of patiently wait for 3.6.6 release?

[Christian PERRIER]

Fellow co-developers,

As it seems it is impossible to convince our well-respected release
team that we have a very trustable upstream (after all, Samba is only
a bunch of kiddies that are "just" managing a free software project
that is only more than one year *older* than The So Wise Debian
Project), I plan to do the following:

-checkout upstream git
-switch to their v3-6-test branch
-roll a tarball out of it
-call it samba 3.6~git20120620
-upload this in unstable
-and just WTF

After all, it's not like we would have proven many times that we're perfectly
capable to handle stable releases and even regression updates.

Do you think that's a reasonable plan or should I try harder to
convince the Debian RT that it would maybe be much wiser to wait for
the experienced Samba release manager to do that work and do it
properly (apparently with many chances that I fail)?

----- Forwarded message from Julien Cristau <jcristau at debian.org> -----

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:58:17 +0200
From: Julien Cristau <jcristau at debian.org>
To: Christian PERRIER <bubulle at debian.org>
Cc: debian-release at lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Samba 3.6.6 due out July 2nd...
X-Mailing-List: <debian-release at lists.debian.org> archive/latest/53857
X-CRM114-Status: Good  ( pR: 999.99  )

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 21:31:04 +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote:

> Quoting Neil McGovern (neilm at debian.org):
> 
> > This would be too late for the freeze, which will be happening in June.
> 
> *that*,  I know..:-)
> 
> > > So, I would like to pre-ask for a freeze exception for samba in case
> > > wheezy is frozen before July 2nd. Of course, it would be better to do
> > > that with a diff, but:
> > > - I don't have it
> > > - it will be quite big (as I said, many bugfixes).
> > > 
> > 
> > Is there a pre-release or rc candidate that you could upload before the
> > freeze?
> 
> If only. But, no. This is not Samba Team policy to do beta and RC
> releases before they ship a stable update. Indeed, their one and only
> release manager just cannot afford that.
> 
Well they'd presumably get more testing that way, meaning better
releases.  The release process doesn't need to be extremely heavy, it's
"build a tarball and put it out somewhere for people to play with".  Or
you could upload a snapshot of the stable branch to sid.

> > > Given the very low history of regression in Samba 3.6.* release cycle,
> > > I think it's a low-risk exception.
> > > 
> > 
> > One of the main issues would be the size of the diff we need to review,
> > hence the suggestion above!
> 
> The size of the diff would be the same. The only difference being that
> what I would upload right now (if an RC release existed) would *not*
> be reviewed.
> 
But it would get two weeks testing in sid that it's not getting right
now.  Which means if nothing else it would make us more confident in a
decision either way.

> Frankly speaking....I would call that just "cheating"..:-). I just
> prefer being honest and ask honestly for a freeze exception, in
> advance, for what I think will be very low risk.
> 
In which case you're way more likely to get a 'no'.

Cheers,
Julien



----- End forwarded message -----

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