Samba 3.6 vs 4.0, and packaging.

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Andrew Bartlett (abartlet at samba.org):

> > When I said that samba 3.6 might have to be extended, I was doing so
> > with my tongue in my cheek, but unless the distro's get their finger's
> > out, we could be in the ludicrous situation that samba 3.6 is
> > discontinued but no distro supplies a Samba 4 package or packages to
> > replace it
> 
> Well, I do wonder if Debian stable might skip Samba 4.0 entirely, and
> jump directly to 4.1.

Time will tell..:-)

Having 4.0 in unstable is only in need of having its build
dependencies in unstable too, which might happen in the upcoming
weeks, hopefully (Jelmer, ring ring knock knock? :-))

My deadline for all this (understand before I upload the whole bunch
myself) is the  Debian Conference, where I'll have free time to give
to this during about 10 days, between Aug 6th and Aug. 18th. Let's
take this as a promise made that there will be a Samba 4.x package in
Debian unstable by mid-August.

But even if 4.1 is released in the meantime, then we'll have 4.1 in
unstable without ever having 4.0, I see no problem for this.

About backports which you mentioned, the tricky part are, again,
dependencies and build dependencies --> it's likely that we have to
backport the whole ldb/tdb/talloc/ctdb/whatever stuff before we can
backport samba 4.x packages. But there will be a demand for that too,
and I hope to be able to fulfill it.