[Pkg-samba-maint] updating samba to current upstream

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2022-03-22 at 23:56 +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> 22.03.2022 22:25, Mathieu Parent wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 7:50 PM Michael Tokarev <mjt at tls.msk.ru>
> > wrote:
> []
> > > Only after that I realized I need to update all libs *first*
> > > (tdb/talloc/tevent/ldb)
> > > *before* updating samba.  I'm doing this now, hopefully to be
> > > ready by tomorrow.
> 
> So this come as a big surprise to me.
> 
> What's the rationaly behind making separate (tdb/talloc/ldb/tevent)
> source packages
> out of single samba upstream source?  I have never seen a case when
> upstream source
> is split into several source packages in debian, before :)
> 
> I guess it is historic, like it was a separate upstream package
> before, but later
> on they merged it into single samba source.  Again, some background
> is welcome,
> so I understand what's going on there.

It is a bit of that.  There was an effort in Samba to spin out these
separate components to live their own life, and have independent
maintainers.  This never really happened with tdb/talloc/ldb/tevent,
while they are useful to the broader community, they are maintained by
and for Samba. 

TDB did live on sourceforge for a while, but we had a more recent copy
in Samba and that is the one that lives on.

There has in the past been the idea that we should cope with version
skew between talloc/tdb/tevent versions on the system - as 'system
packages' - and a installed Samba that might not need the most recent
version, as proof we are honouring our ABI promises etc.  

Our CI testing however is only for the matching versions, and I don't
like promises being made that we don't test.

I've pushed for a very long time to have ldb brought back into Samba,
we maintain a very strict version dependency between ldb and Samba.  I
think there is finally a consensus to do that, but I've not had more
time to burn on it.

> We had long story with qemu and its fork under name "kvm" which later
> has been
> renamed to "qemu-kvm" and finally merged into qemu source, making
> lots of
> confusions on the way, also swallowing a library (libslirp) and later
> making it
> separate again. So I know some drills in this area :)
> 
> What's the problem with making it all to build from one source, like
> the ldb
> "merge" MR is trying to do?
> 
> Mathieu, you said the resulting libldb does not work right when
> building some
> other software (sssd). What's the difference between the two
> resulting .debs -
> one built from "separate" ldb source and one built as part of samba
> build?
> Why not fix the differences?

I would be very glad to help upstream such changes.

> Looking at your MR, I see you imported some files in debian/ from ldb
> source
> package and later updated them to match samba package layout, and at
> the same
> time, some files were moved to a different subdir (ldb => samba).
> Maybe it's
> a good idea to move them "back"?
> 
> Why sssd does not build, does it expect ldb headers in the "wrong"
> place?
> Did you compare the two builds?
> 
> It'd be nice to have some more context in some patches, - eg, in
> Force-LDB-as-standalone.patch - why it is needed (I haven't yet
> understand
> how the build system works - maybe after my understanding there will
> be no
> need for a comment :) ).
> 
> That's too many questions probably.
> 
> The thing is: I really hate doing unnecessary work. And updating all
> the
> split-out packages out of the SAME source is really unnecessary extra
> work.

I totally agree.

> I'd better spend time to make a way to eliminate the need for this
> unnecessary work _before_ doing this unnecessary work :) Yes I know,
> sometimes this is not possible. But it looks like this is not the
> case :)

Thanks for stepping up with new energy and passion to maintain Samba in
Debian!

I don't have time to do the work, but I can very much advise and
encourage.

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead, Catalyst IT   https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba

Samba Development and Support, Catalyst IT - Expert Open Source
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