New Samba on old platforms

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2018-06-23 at 16:47 +0100, Rowland Penny via samba-technical
wrote:
> 
> If someone wants to build an unsupported version of Samba (as in not
> supported by the distro) on SLES 11 or RHEL 6, then surely they should
> also be capable of sourcing libjansson as well. In my opinion, arguing
> about these distro's is a waste of time.

G'Day Rowland 

Yes, for some reason (fear of platform upgrades essentially) it is
exceedingly common for brand new Samba deployments to be made on very
old platforms.  This is even for the AD DC, where we strongly recommend
against running in combination with other services (so a platform
upgrade of that VM should be easy) and can easily join a new DC on a
new VM. 

For example, our users screamed when we accidentally broke Python 2.6
and so RHEL 6 (with EPEL).

To be clear, this is actually orthogonal to the parent discussion,
because the Jannsson package is in EPEL6, but this is a very worthwhile
point!

A clear statement on supported (or you will have to fetch the libraries
yourself) platforms would reduce the development burden and encourage
the re-use of external code, at the price of pushing (forcing) users to
newer host platforms.

Even if we agree a broader set of supported platforms it would help, as
we avoid having the 'why did you depend on X?!?' discussion after the
code has been written or (as has happened) many months later. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba