[Pkg-samba-maint] Packaging Samba 4.2 in Debian

[Jelmer Vernooij]

With (almost) jessie out of the door, I've had a look at packaging
Samba 4.2 for Sid today.

There appear to be a number of issues currently preventing 4.2 from
being uploaded:

 * Samba 4.2 includes ctdb, rather than supporting system versions *
   (https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2014-October/103189.html)

With Samba being the origin of the latest ctdb release, do we want to keep
shipping standalone ctdb packages?

No other packages in the archive currently depend on it, and with
the recent changes Samba can no longer use it.

 * Samba 4.2 uses a patched Heimdal, with changes that are neither
   upstream nor in the Heimdal Debian package *

The skew between Samba's copy of Heimdal and upstream Heimdal has been
frustrating me for a long time. Getting the right changes upstreamed
and then packaged in Debian takes up a lot of time and has caused
complications.

For example, we're currently shipping a rc of Heimdal 1.6 in Debian to
allow building of Samba, rather than a stable version of Heimdal. This
in turn has meant that we've run into several bugs that were newly
introduced in Heimdal 1.6. [1]

At this point, I'm inclined to just use the bundled Heimdal. We could
reconsider this when (if?) Samba starts supporting MIT Kerberos [2].
Thoughts?

 * Some API changes break OpenChange *
   (e.g. https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2015-January/104847.html)

We need to get these changes reverted for the moment, or revert them
just in the Debian packages.

Longer term, I'm working upstream on OpenChange to make it buildable
with only minimal Samba interaction.

Cheers,

Jelmer

[1] In my defense, Heimdal has been *very* slow releasing 1.6 - "release
candidate" 1 and 2 were released in February last year and nothing has
happened release-wise since.
[2] Some of the RedHat engineers are supposedly working on this.
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