[Pkg-samba-maint] Debian local patches and Samba

[Michael Tokarev]

08.05.2022 23:11, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> Michael,
> 
> Just a note following up from some comments on Bug#971249.
> 
> In the past it has been the strong practice in Samba packaging on
> Debian not to include local patches, except where those have already
> been accepted upstream (eg backports from master).
> 
> The rationale has been that this avoids divergence, forward-porting and
> allows upstream to express and experienced judgement regarding the
> patches.  It also ensures that, at least in combination with git
> master, the patch passes CI (avoiding unwanted side-effects).

Yes, this is a very good practice.  I tend to follow the same rules
in other packages too, for example qemu.  I *removed* a few patches
which made debian version to behave differently from upstream in a
few packages, and already asked about similar patch in debian samba
too (flipping usershare default).

What I do there is to move things which by definition do not belong
to where they're put, and which does not affect anything else.
Like the socket directory - it must not be in /var, there's /run for
it.

Another case is the spelling fixes I posted initially. I do not want
to remove this patch from debian patches, even if upstream does not
want to accept it (tho I should clean it up to remove places where
it touches the published docs).  I can also remove the place where
it renames a local variable, - this is something which touches the
code. Hopefully there's no tests needs to be written for the spelling
fixes like this.

The change in testparm (to stop it from erroring out if /run/samba
does not exist) is another example of "obvious-wrong", and it lets
the packaging to have much less stupid workarounds. If that's not
accepted upstream we can revert it, - it wont affect anything but
our own startup scripts and may introduce the old bugs again.

> I think this has served us well, and I would continue to encourage the
> submission of patches upstream via GitLab per
> https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Contribute
> 
> If you have any difficulties with this process please discuss on samba-
> technical, we remain glad to help ensure Samba is as good as possible
> for Debian.

Well, I posted several questions and proposals to samba-techincal@,
none of which were answered. Including all recent changes.

I don't plan to add more stuff.  Actually I didn't plan to add any
stuff at all, I just wanted to fix a bug :)

Thanks,

/mjt