[Samba] Re: 3.0.25 packages for debian/ubuntu

[Christian Perrier]

> With all due respect for the package maintainers of the Debian and Ubuntu 
> distros... I sort of wish there would be a way of getting "official 
> packages" of the current build verses some custom concoction (security 
> updates only). (shrug) I certainly do not seem to be the person to "make 
> that happen".

You're slightly wrong on that part.

backports.org has been set up precisely for that purpose.

There is currently no backporter for samba, only because the
maintenance team has enough to do with fighting with the big bunch of
old crappy bugs we have in Debian BTS.

However, having someone in the team working on backports would be
highly welcomed. These could be pretty easily sent to backports.org
for the benefit of Debian users who want to:
-keep running stable
-keep the packaging practices of the official Debian archive

See http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=contribute for details.

Please also note that both the Samba Team and the Debian packaging
team do their best for their packaging practices to converge. This
way, the deb packages provided on samba.org would indeed be as
identical as possible to the ones in the Debian archive.

We currently have a few blockers for this, the most difficult one
being that giant fhs.patch we use in Debian to respect the FHS for
some file locations (/var/cache/samba for discardable data
vs. /var/lib/samba for non-discardable ones mostly)