Technical Release Manager for Samba

[Andreas Schneider]

On Thursday 07 May 2015 07:44:55 Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 12:36 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 08:41:10PM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 08:13:18PM +0200, Michael Adam wrote:
> > > > On 2015-05-05 at 16:41 +0200, Stefan (metze) Metzmacher wrote:
> > > > > > In thinking about 4 month release cycles, I've been concerned that
> > > > > > our
> > > > > > current 'nobody is in charge'/consensus mode of operation may make
> > > > > > practical operation difficult.
> > > > > 
> > > > > As written before I think 4 month cycles are too short for us.
> > > > > 6 would be ok for me.
> > > > 
> > > > Is this a gut feeling or is there reasoning behind this?
> > > > 
> > > > For me, this really depends on how much we would be able to
> > > > slim down the release and maintenance work:
> > > > 
> > > > I do certainly see the appeal for having very short release
> > > > cycles. By having releases very frequently (<= 4 months), each
> > > > single one becomes much less important, and more easy to do.
> > > 
> > > We need to revisit our support statement then. With 4 months, a single
> > > release is only supported for a year. This might be pretty short for
> > > some.
> > 
> > Six months is clearly too short. My preference - aim for 6 months,
> > and don't be too upset if it ends up at 9.
> > 
> > We have to step back and ask who the releases are for ?
> > 
> > OEMs usually have their own release tree - they use our
> > release numbers as a guide, but are willing and able to
> > use git trees and back-port specific patches for their
> > customers.
> > 
> > Linux distros IMHO are the biggest consumers of our release
> > streams, so I'd like to hear what would work best for
> > them.
> 
> We also have a large and growing number of users deploying Samba's AD
> DC.  I strongly suspect that most of our AD DC installs are not from a
> linux distro, but from source or from Sernet's packages.  Certainly is
> is where I hear most of customers installing Samba from, as no matter
> what we do the version in CentOS/RHEL will be 'too old' for them.

The reason for this is cause the Samba DC does not use MIT Kerberos which is a 
requirement for Enterprise distributions. I'm sure the number will go up once 
a DC can be shipped with Fedora/openSUSE and later RHEL and SLE.


	-- andreas

-- 
Andreas Schneider                   GPG-ID: CC014E3D
Samba Team                             asn at samba.org
www.samba.org