[Pkg-samba-maint] Debian packaging workflow

[Brian Campbell]

Hi!

I'm maintaining a downstream packaging of Samba for a NAS vendor, and
am trying to figure out the best workflow to keep up to date with the
Debian packaging. I've been pulling from Git and applying our own
patches on top in a separate branch. In general that seems to work
fairly well; when there's something new from Debian, I can merge in
the Debian branch, then figure out what fixes I need to make to our
patches, dependencies, etc, and make those changes on our branch. I
usually use quilt for applying all of the patches in debian/patches
and working with the patched version of the source when fixing up our
local patches, then pop off all of the patches and build with
git-buildpackage.

However, some time between the 4.1 branch and the 4.3 branch, I
noticed that it seems that the patches in debian/patches are being
applied to the upstream sources outside of the debian directory. This
means that I can no longer easily use quilt to manage our patches on
top of the ones from Debian; if I do "quilt push -a", it complains
that the patches are already applied. I can apply a patch to our Git
branch that un-applies of the patches in the upstream source, and
refreshes all of the patches in debian/patches, which allows me to use
quilt again, but then I'll get lots of merge conflicts the next time I
merge from the Debian branch.

I'm wondering what workflow the Debian package maintainers are using
to import and manage patches that works with the changes applied to
the upstream sources; it doesn't look like either quilt or gbp-pq. If
there's some other workflow that would be more convenient for me to
manage patches downstream, I'd love to know.

Finally, I've noticed that Jelmer has put out a request for assistance
in packaging Samba. I am not a Debian Developer or Debian Maintainer,
but I've gotten some experience with packaging by packaging our own
software and maintaining our local forks of various software like
Samba. If there's anything I can do to contribute back to the process,
let me know.

One thing I could do, if it would help, is give a shot at producing
backports of Samba 4.3 to Jessie (and maybe Wheezy) so that there will
be an upstream supported version available now that 4.1 is out of
support, but I would need to upload to mentors.debian.net and have
someone else review and upload.

Thanks,
Brian