[Pkg-samba-maint] Debian packaging workflow

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2016-03-29 at 14:32 -0400, Brian Campbell wrote:
> 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.

A backport of Samba 4.3 to Jessie would be very, very helpful.  As you
know, 4.1 won't get this upcoming security release, so a working
backport will give us more options, so I strongly encourage any work
you can do there.

We do really, really need help.

Thanks!

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett
https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team         https://samba.org
Samba Development and Support, Catalyst IT   
https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba