[Samba] Building Samba backports for Debian-like systems.

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2022-10-21 at 15:49 +0200, Lorenzo Milesi via samba wrote:
> > I would not expect to see any package updates from Louis for
> > sometime.
> 
> I'd like to try building packages, at least for the Debian family
> distributions. I'm not great at packaging, but I did build some .debs
> in the past, so I'd like to give it a try. And now that I know
> Michael is on the channel, I might ping him for issues :D
> 
> Unfortunately, I have no big idea of what Louis was packaging. I
> suppose they were vanilla sources. I had a look at Debian sources,
> and I see a lot of patches being applied.
> I'd start from there and strip out the unnecessary stuff, in order to
> keep full compatibility with Debian system but with plain source.
> Unless Michael has suggestions on what should be mandatory
> included...
> 
> If anyone else has experience with packaging, I'll be happy to join
> efforts.

In general, the Debian packages have not included much unnecessary
stuff.  Michael includes a few more patches prior to acceptance
upstream, but previously there was quite a strict line that patches
were only included once already accepted upstream.

So I would generally work to do any backports with the minimum changes
strictly required.  

I would also look carefully at the package sources from Louis and work
from there, to avoid extra rework.

Samba packaging is a pain, watch our for the need for a matching LDB
(finally bundled in modern Debian, via a patch I need to upstream). 

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett (he/him)       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Samba Team Member (since 2001) https://samba.org
Samba Team Lead, Catalyst IT   https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba

Samba Development and Support, Catalyst IT - Expert Open Source
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