Monday, April 28 - Samba Mashup Report

Gerald (Jerry) Carter jerry at samba.org
Mon Apr 28 15:50:28 GMT 2008


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

** Samba Mashup Report (SMR) for Monday April 28, 2008 **

Table of Contents:

  0. Greetings to the Inaugural SMR (samba Mashup Report)
  1. Plans in Motion for 6 Month Samba 3.x Release Cycles
  2. Samba 3.2.0pre3 Released
  3. Samba XP 2008 Concludes as YASC (yet another successful
     conference)
  4. Samba Documentation repository moved from SVN to Git
  5. Bugzilla Day for Samba 3.2 scheduled for Friday, May 9.
  6. Call for developer reports


=======================================================
0. Greetings to the Inaugural SMR (samba Mashup Report)
=======================================================

Several of Samba team members agreed during discussions
held at Samba XP (see article #3) that periodic thread
summaries from the recent development activities would
be helpful for keeping the community and Samba OEM vendors
up to date.  So using editorial privilege, I've decided to
term these as mashup reports.

According to the pop culture definition from Wikipedia,
mashup usually means:

    * A web application that combines data and/or
      functionality from more than one source
    * A musical genre of songs that consist entirely of
      parts of other songs
    * A video that is edited from more than one source
      to appear as one
    * In parts of the UK means a mash or pot of tea
      (colloq. Yorkshire), other areas brew or stand tea

The second and third definitions are probably the most
appropriate here.  So without further ado, here's the
inaugural bi-weekly (give or take a few days) report.

cheers,  jerry


============================================
1. Plans in Motion for 6 Month Release Cycle
============================================

Based on feedback from the community, Samba Team members have
agreed to put into place a six month release cycle on new
Samba 3.x releases.  The initial 3.2 release will start the
clock on the next major development effort.

In the thread beginning at [1], Jerry Carter (Samba Team
member) proposed:

    Once a new release cycle is done, that version goes
    straight to bug fix mode and the next release cycle gets
    a new minor release number.

    So for example, assume 3.2.0 is released in the next
    30 days.  The 3.2 releases are immediately in maintenance
    mode meaning we can fix all the regressions and bugs we
    like.  But no new features.  The next 6 month cycle clock
    starts ticking and that becomes v3.3.

    Karolin (Seeger) will have the job of setting dates and
    we have to stick to them.

Christian Perrier (a Debian samba package maintainer) pointed
out this would be a lot of work and maybe not achievable.
Jim McDonough (Samba Team member) highlighted Jerry's main
point which is:

    ...it will definitely require a mind shift from the "Wait,
    we have to have _my_ major piece" mode that currently
    dominates scheduling of releases.  The developer who writes
    the code has to decide if the code will be ready for the
    schedule, rather than delaying the schedule (and everyone's
    code) until the code is ready.


===========================
2. Samba 3.2.0pre3 Released
===========================

The third Preview release of Samba 3.2.0 was released on
Friday, April 25 [2]. This is the last scheduled preview
release with an estimated date for RC1 set by Karolin Seeger
(Samba 3.2 release manager) of May 23 [3].  The number and
frequency of release candidates will be decided by the
quality and feedback from the community testers of the pre3
release.

And in preparation for committing to a 6 month release cycle,
the Samba 3.3 development branch has been created to stem
the rate of change in the 3.2 code [4][5].  Samba 3.3 is
tentatively scheduled for delivery sometime in December, 2008.



===============================================
3. Samba XP 2008 Concludes as YASC (yet another
   successful conference)
===============================================

The seventh annual Samba eXPerience Conference concluded in
Goettingen, DE, on April 18th [6].

Talks were presented about topics such as:

    * Samba's relationship with the Protocol Freedom
      Information Foundation (PFIF)
    * SMB2 protocol details
    * The latest developments in projects such as the Linux
      CIFS file system, OpenChange, and of course Samba itself.

This year marked a milestone as bother members of the Samba
Team, Microsoft engineers, and developers from numerous
companies openly presented and discussed details of
CIFS and related protocol based upon newly available WSPP
documentation.

Conference pictures are available on-line now.  The audio
portion of talks as well as session slides will be available
soon from the conference web site.


=======================================================
4. Samba Documentation repository moved from SVN to Git
=======================================================

The Docbook/XML source of the Samba HOWTOs and man pages is
no longer hosted in Subversion.  In an effort to ensure
more release specific and accurate docs, the samba-docs
SVN report has been migrated into the Samba git repository.
The Docbook/XML source now resides in the samba/docs-xml/
directory.

The Subversion repository will remain online for reference
but has been closed to all changes.


=========================================================
5. Bugzilla Day for Samba 3.2 scheduled for Friday, May 9
=========================================================

Another Bugzilla day of tracking down defects in Samba 3.2
has been scheduled for Friday, May 9 [7].  All developers
and users interested in the 3.2 release are encouraged
to participate on the #samba-technical channel on
irc.freenode.net.

If you want to participate, here are a few guidelines:

    * You do not have to be a developer.
    * You must be running 3.2.0pre3 on some server or client.
    * You must be using a configuration that worked
      successfully on a prior version of Samba 3.0.
    * You must be comfortable providing sufficient debug
      information in the case that we identify a legitimate
      failure. This might be debug logs, network traces, etc...


=============================
6. Call for developer reports
=============================

Future editions of the Samba Mashup Report will include a
section on current developer activities, please send a short
summary of your work to webeditor at samba.org.



==========
References
==========

[1]http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2008-April/058725.html
[2]http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-announce/2008/000135.html
[3]http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Release_Planning_for_Samba_3.2
[4]http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2008-April/058851.html
[5]http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2008-April/058866.html
[6]http://www.sambaxp.com/
[7]http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Bugzilla_Day

==
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFIFfJEIR7qMdg1EfYRAgzeAKChJNzA2fhvsxB74o48ejtOIh50EQCgoOIs
NU5858EjUQln0pNsirmulHo=
=sRiu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


More information about the samba-announce mailing list