[Samba] samba debian & ubuntu builds

Michael Tokarev mjt at tls.msk.ru
Fri May 10 11:00:11 UTC 2024


Hi!

After providing samba builds for several debian and ubuntu releases for over 1.5 years,
I see this service is quite popular still.

However, I'd love to understand how useful it is still, and which releases should be
provided in the future.

For example, samba 4.16.x series is end-of-life, there has been no updates for it for
quite some time and none planned, either.  Yet people do have it in their sources.list
still, and the package list is being queried on regular basis, getting the same list
each time obviously.  I removed this release from my repository some time ago and
someone asked on the list for it the next day.  But I think this becomes a mis-service, -
when people see the repository for 4.16 is up and running, they think this release is
supported and will receive updates and fixes (or else there would be no need to query
the updated list of packages), while this is not the case anymore.

So, I think I'll remove at least 4.16 packages (for all distributions), and 4.17 too
(due to the same reason).

Now, Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and Debian 10 Buster are old too.  Samba 4.19 and up
can't be built for these easily anymore (required dependencies are missing).  So we
do have 4.18 packages for these distributions still (after removing 4.16 and 4.17), -
maybe I'll keep this for a while, but their days are numbered anyway.

On the plus side, I added Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat to the list of distributions, -
this only have samba 4.20.x since it ships 4.19 out of the box already, and hopefully
will keep it updated in the future (if not, it's not a big deal to add 4.19 too, as
long as it is supported still).  Dunno yet if these will be useful.  Also, I haven't
looked at further changes made to samba by ubuntu for 24.04, - I haven't heard
anything from them at all, so don't know what they're doing.

This is JFYI, and please watch out which parts of the repository you're using and
why.  I still see some access URLs which were used at the very first test of this
repository (for a week or so in autumn of 2022), - I renamed the paths within to
simplify things, but quite some people still request old URLs every day 1.5 years
later, apparently not caring at all what their systems are doing...

Thanks,

/mjt
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