[Pkg-samba-maint] Debian packaging workflow

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Brian,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 02:32:38PM -0400, Brian Campbell wrote:
> 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.
What kind of changes do you have on top of 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.
We're using quilt and gbp-buildpackage. Personally I'm not using gbp-pq, but as
far as I can tell it should work too.

> 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 for offering to help out!

It's fine if you're not a Debian Maintainer or Developer. I can help sponsor
uploads to both unstable and to backports.

One of the things that in particular also needs to happen is for more people to help out with the bugs filed against the package, and to figure out what to do to fix them or to see if they have been fixed by recent upstream releases. (https://bugs.debian.org/src:samba)

Cheers,

Jelmer