Bits from the Samba packaging team in Debian

[Christian Perrier]

Hello dear Samba (and hopefully Debian/Ubuntu) users,

Please find here some news from the team that packages Samba for
Debian (and threfore indirectly for Ubuntu).

As some of you might know, Debian 5.0 "lenny" was released on February
14th.

Samba provided in lenny in the 3.2.5 version plus two fixes from
3.2.6:

  * Fix segfault whan accessign some NAS devices running old versions of Samba
    Closes: #500129
  * Fix process crush when using gethostbyname_r in several threads
    Closes: #509101, #510450

As usual with the policy in Debian wrt stable releases, we will stick
to that version and only security fixes should go in Lenny.

However, we are considering to fix a few issues that could be
considered close to "release critical", some of them being fixed in
3.2.6.


Of course, as soon as Debian stable is released, the development of
the next Debian version begins. That version, codename "squeeze", is
of course not planned yet. You can bet on something like 18-24 months
release cycle, as usual.

Samba 3.3.0, which we were parking in Debian experimental, thus
appeared on Sunday Feb. 15th in Debian unstable (and soon Debian
testing, hopefully. That version has no important packaging change wrt
3.2.5 and should therefore be as stable as the Samba Team made it..:-)

One important change we plan to do is now compiling Samba with CTDB,
thanks to the great work of Mathieu Parent, who maintains the ctdb
package. While I'm personnally ignorant about CTDB, I think we can see
this as a very promising evolution.

Another important evolution is the preparation of parallel
installations of Samba 3 and Samba 4 on the same server. This will
probably happen for Squeeze, with the great help of Jelmer Vernooij,
who maintains samba4 packages.

We will also continue to maintain packages for Etch, the former Debian
release (these are 3.0.24-based) as long as that release is officially
supported in Debian and, hopefully, we will maintain backported
packages of 3.3.* for Lenny, on http://www.backports.org