[Samba] samba version to use on CentOS?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:42 PM,  <scott_stone at trendmicro.com> wrote:
> it's Fedora EPEL which is the enterprise repository.. ie, Fedora packages specifically ported to work on CentOS.  It used to be part of the fedora mirror but now it's its own thing, at least on mirrors.kernel.org.  Turns out, however, that both versions of samba are part of the CentOS 5 base repo.

Fedora EPEL is a very handy backport repository, porting Fedora
packages back to RHEL. They have considerable support from RedHat, and
make RedHat's frankly "so stable it's stopped breathing" release of
RHEL 5 usable. CentOS is a carefully matched fork of RHEL, so the
compatibility with CentOS is excellent, and some tools (such as mock)
use CentOS resources rather than RHEL because those are freely
accessed without a license.

If you look upstream to RHEL repositories, you'll see that both those
packages come from RedHat's RHEL 5, and are rebuilt from SRPM's.
They're useful, but seriously dated.

There are binaries and some RPM's for 3.5.x releases at ftp.sernet.de,
and I like them. I've been trying to get Samba 4 to build as an RPM,
but it's painful: the switch from "autoconf" based build tools to
"WAF" is driving me nutty, as is the confusing presence of sourc3
content in parallel to source4 tools, and the discarding of
installation to "sbin" targets for mount.cifs and umount.cifs
utilities, and dependency tracking to get certain components built.
It's painful work.