Samba in redhat 5.1

[Andrew Tridgell]

Erik and Bob,

The Samba RPM as shipped with redhat 5.1 is fairly badly broken in
ways that show some poor quality control. I'm writing to you to try
and sort out how RedHat Samba RPMs should be organised in the future.

The first problem is that although you updated the Samba version used
to build your RPM you didn't update the config file. This means you
shipped a old and broken config file that contains such deprecated
options as "socket address". That config option has caused us no end
of grief and has caused thousands of people to have trouble with
Samba. The fact that you still ship with a config file that has that
option shows that you didn't read our new config file and don't read
the Samba mailing list where this issue has been discussed many times.

Remember that it is often the Samba Team and our bug tracking system
that has to deal with thousands of unhappy users, as people often come
to us for help with your distribution. 

The second problem is that you obviously didn't run through the basic
system tests that are described in DIAGNOSIS.txt that comes with
Samba. You ship the Samba docs but you can't have read them! Many of
the tests fail because you didn't include the codepage files that are
an essential part of Samba 1.9.18p5 (the version you shipped). This
means that Samba does not work correctly. Jeremy Allison spent a
_long_ time getting the codepage support right in Samba and documented
it carefully. That work is wasted on RedHat 5.1 users.

We ship working RedHat RPMs and SRPMs from our ftp and web site. I
appreciate that you may wish to adjust those for your distributions
but I would ask that you at least start with our RPMs and make your
changes to those. That way you won't make major mistakes like shipping
a config file from one version with a binary from another. You
obviously don't have time to test things properly yourselves so using
our SRPMs as a basis for your work will save us both a lot of bother.

If there is something about our SRPMs that makes them unsuitable as a
basis for your distribution then please let us know so we can work it
out. 

Regards, Andrew